


Blind Fury Roar

by Augment



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Luffy-centric (sort of), Zoro-centric, light on the comfort, various OCs that serve as narrative devices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 17:11:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9247403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Augment/pseuds/Augment
Summary: Sometimes the cost of immortality is death. After witnessing the death of his captain and dying himself, Zoro wakes up in an alien world.A sort-of space AU set in the One Piece world after everything.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The outline and a few thousand words of this story have been sitting in my draft folder for more than eight years. About a year ago I decided I was going to finish this thing if it killed me. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone (i.e. there is an attempt at plot), and to be honest the premise is a beast of a thing that deserves more words than I ended up giving it, but I’ve done my best. I actually _planned_ this one, that’s got to be worth something.
> 
> The story is set in a future where all of the One Piece world has travelled into space, which means not only is this space opera but it is space pirate opera. There are no pairings, but the focus is on Zoro and Luffy. Warnings for melodramatic writing.
> 
> The fic takes canon up until approximately Dressrosa, and then assumes ~stuff happened~ and Luffy became Pirate King.
> 
> Please enjoy!

First, he is aware.

Then, he is aware of feeling nothing. Numbness spreads throughout his body, and he can only feel his consciousness.

Then, the numbness fades, and he can feel _everything_. Every inch of skin, every muscle, every sensation delivered to his nerves, he is aware of it like he has never been before. He is aware of the exact boundary between his body and some sort of liquid – entirely enveloped, unmoving, undisturbed, but fully submerged. It is pressure against his eyelids, which he cannot move, it holds his fingers in stasis. It is in his ears, his nose. It’s not water. He can taste it in the back of his throat, and it’s filling his lungs. But his chest doesn’t burn for oxygen and he’s not suffocating.

And then there is a surge throughout his entire body and the silence is shattered by the loud beating of his heart. It pumps the blood through his body, sluggish at first and then roaringly, through his arms and legs, to the tips of his fingers and his toes, and he can feel them, move them. _Now_ he is suffocating – he has no air in his lungs to begin with, and he is immediately drowning. Black clouds his vision and he blindly thrashes. The viscous fluid, twice as thick as water, resists his movement, making his weak throes even weaker. There is no space for reason, there is no time to think, he just kicks and moves and gambles the little energy he has on _somehow_ getting to air.

He’s lucky, so lucky. The glass cylinder in which he is encased, suspended in fluid, is not fastened to its pedestal. His movement, weak as it is, is enough to upset the balance, lend just enough momentum to the top of the cylinder so it pitches forward, whereupon gravity greedily takes hold. The entire ensemble collapses, hits the hard, tiled floor and shatters, spilling its prisoner free.

Whose first action is to take a breath of air. But there’s no room in his lungs, so he spends the next ten minutes alternatively coughing up lungfuls of the horrid, clear fluid and sucking in great gulps of air until all he’s coughing up is spittle laced with blood, and he’s giddy from the oxygen.

It’s dark. Where is he? What the hell happened? Where are his nakama-

_Fuck_. _Fuck, Luffy. Oh god,_ Luffy.

Zoro, ill-advisedly, remembers. The floodgates open and memories come galloping back. He remembers the adventures, the fun, the smiles, the tears, the friends and foes, the capture, the desperate race against time, the anguish, the proud tilt of the head, the execution, the

_If he had air to spare, he would scream in realisation and grief._

utter soul-destroying despair, the reinforcements arriving far too late, the overwhelming anger, the swords, the blood – his, theirs – the fear,

_The memories flow so fast he hasn’t got enough time to feel the emotions that flow with them. A sense of overloaded numbness creeps in, with its base in the strongest emotions of rage and misery._

the opponents, their strength, the wounds, the pain, the bullet ripping through his heart, his death and black.

_What?_

He begins to shake, through cold, realisation, anger, but most poignantly, grief. His captain. _His captain_. They’d killed him, with fear and violence. Zoro had stood, as helpless as the rest of the crew, and watched as blades entered the heart of the Pirate King, and all light disappeared from his world.

He’d seen such red, as he never had before. He had become a Fury, bent on revenge and destruction. Anything that stood in his way was cut down, and he was the strongest he’d ever been, so the bodies piled up, and the soil turned to mud with the blood he took in reparation.

He’d faced Mihawk and others as strong as him before, and beaten them all. But he’d faced them singly, and their totality of strength was beyond any single person’s reach. And they’d beaten him back and wounded him over and over again until he was barely hanging together and he almost smiled when the bullet from some unknown hand travelled through their wall of attack and into him. He’d known all along he couldn’t live without his captain like Silvers had – in reminiscence and drink – he’d known that through no conscious act of his own, he’d die soon after. He didn’t envy the others the pain they would face, protected now by their allies. He experienced something he’d felt whispers of before, and knew it to be death.

Except that now, here he is, and he _is_ experiencing the pain, the loss, the unbearable ache of grief. Weakly, he splays his hand across his chest, over his heart. He feels no hole. He is alive, and torn apart. He is barely strong enough to stand, and his muscles have the feel of a slight atrophy that comes with long disuse. He wonders how long he’s been dead-but-not-dead.

The intensity of the grief is numbing, and even though he still can’t breathe properly and it has nothing to do with actual air, he shuts down emotionally. He has the unhappy feeling this blessed detachment will be temporary, but his first priority is to find out what the fuck is going on.

Zoro realises he’s been lying in the remains of his prison for several minutes, yet no alarm has been raised, and none of what he assumes to be his warders have appeared. He notices the room has no windows and is dimly illuminated, the only source of light coming from the three other cylinders of liquid in the room. The fluid seems to be phosphorous; he himself glows. The other containers hold bodies, clothed in only a loincloth with elastic around the waist, as he was – is. Unsteadily, Zoro lifts himself to his feet, and has to pause to catch his breath. Unfit. He’s never been this unfit. His muscles feel weak and underused, like he hasn’t exercised in a fortnight – unthinkable.

Finding wobbly footing, Zoro approaches the other prisoners in their pale tombs and immediately notices they all have one thing in common – death. The first cylinder holds a young man with a five centimetre hole perfectly centred in his chest, and Zoro can see all the way through to the other side. The second prisoner has a tedious, clerky look about him and has had his throat cut so deeply that the head lolls back in a grotesque manner, even supported by the viscosity of the liquid. The third, somehow vaguely familiar, is an old man, emaciated and thin, his skin outlining his bones and his body shrunken such that his head seems too large. He’s covered with old scars, and has rotated enough in the fluid for Zoro to see five large splays of scar tissue on his back. There are plaques beneath each cylinder. The first two mean nothing to him, but the third:

> Rob Lucci, Ex-Government Agent
> 
> Pre-Expansion, Lucci had a promising career in the cause of Justice, rising rapidly through the ranks to become the head of the powerful CP9 task force, due in part to the power of the Neko Neko Leopard Devil Fruit. Despite this promising start, and a later promotion to CP-0, Lucci was doomed to suffer defeat at the hands of the second ‘Pirate King’ not once, but twice. Although he attempted to flee his worthy punishment, Lucci was caught and kept in captivity until his eventual death. The artifact is kindly on loan from the WGAAR.

Zoro has no idea who the WGAAR are, but he remembers Lucci. Remembers the fight – the first time they declared war on the government, the first time he used Asura, the first time Luffy used Gear. He remembers how close they came to losing, and Luffy to dying (again, and again, and again) and he remembers the cat-like grace, the strength and the ruthlessness. What he does not remember is this broken and starved old man in front of him. The plaque talks of Lucci as if he were ancient history. Lucci _looks_ ancient history.

And then it hits him – this is a museum. The four cylinders and their contents are exhibits – actual bodies representing a much better souvenir than death masks. His body had been one of the exhibits, because he had been dead, preserved for display. Then the question begs: _how had they not known he was alive?_ He has no doubt that they think he’s dead, because there are no guards outside the room, and still no one has come to investigate the noise. And he _was_ dead – the bullet had taken out his heart, and it had stopped beating because he had heard it restart. Somehow he had healed – but _how_ and why? – and now he was alive, and raw, and itching for more blood despite spilling gallons merely hours ago.

Except it probably wasn’t hours. Luffy’s death didn’t occur today. Zoro has no idea how long he’s been out, but it hasn’t been merely a matter of weeks or even months. He’ll find out though, get a handle on the situation, find his nakama. If Zoro is going to be denied his martyrdom, he’ll take revenge instead. Their enemies are going to fucking _pay_.

Zoro grabs one of the shards of glass from his cylinder, holding it carefully. On closer inspection, it might not be glass at all, but something much sturdier. He’s lucky it broke on impact. The only door leading out of the room is locked or jammed (there is no keyhole), but the flimsy indoor hinges give way to persistent attacks, and the door collapses inwards with a bang. The sound echoes through the building, and Zoro walks out onto an empty walkway. He is on one level amongst many, the walkways circling a cavernous hall with an empty lobby below. The ceiling is high and vaulted.

Zoro takes care to hack the hinges from the outside, and smear the glowing footprints left by his bare feet, so it hopefully won’t occur to whoever discovers this that the body walked out of its own volition. There is a noticeboard outside the exhibition room, which advertises an exhibit featuring him, Lucci, and the two others (criminals as well, though not pirates). Zoro fights back a sick feeling.

Staggering slightly, and winded from his exertions, Zoro makes his way in what he hopes is a downward direction. All the windows are shuttered tightly, and it’s impossible to tell what time of day it is, though it’s obviously not within opening hours. Zoro leans heavily against a door to catch his breath, and is startled when it swings inward. He’s stumbled into a bathroom. There’s a tiny unshuttered porthole in the far wall of the small room, and it reveals a sky speckled with stars, and no moon. It’s night-time.

On his way back out, Zoro catches sight of himself in the mirror. And the face that stares out at him is not the one he’s seen on bounty posters. It’s not just that his skin is pale and sickly and still glowing slightly. It’s not just his softening muscles, and his visible ribs. It’s not just the spray of scar tissue over his heart, or the ridged line across his chest that used to be a mark of his first failure. It’s the face he remembers seeing in the mirror before he met Luffy. It’s rage and frustration and tiredness, and suddenly he remembers the _power_ that came with that part of himself. When the only thing that mattered was getting stronger, fulfilling a vow, wreaking vengeance upon a world that stole so unfairly the life of one so full of promise – Kuina, then.

“Roronoa Zoro.”

He tests his name, to see if it still fits this weird image of him. His voice grates from disuse and his violent coughing, but this is not why the words sound strange. They sound strange because he wants to follow them with ‘pirate hunter.’ Despite refusing to lay claim to that title, it had been repeated next to his name so many times that during his early career it had essentially become him, without him actually realising it. And then Luffy had appeared, and Zoro had turned from pirate hunter into pirate, from lone wolf into nakama, and finally, gloriously, into the World’s Greatest Swordsman and first mate to the Pirate King.

And now Luffy is gone, but Zoro remains. He should have died with his King, _tried to_ , to save himself from the grief he was certain would destroy him. Yet here is, despite his best efforts. No longer the Zoro of cheerful grins and nakamaship, but alone and scarred, looking at a face that lived for nothing but the fire of the fight and the sweetness of death dealt.

And this time, revenge.

“Welcome back, hunter.”

 

* * *

 

Out of the bathroom – after having rinsed off the worst of the glowing fluid – and down the stairs, Zoro has a new sense of purpose. His first point of order is to get some clothes, because while Zoro has never been body-conscious he feels the loincloth will probably draw unwelcome attention.

He’s trying to find some sense of direction among the corridors when he hears the soft shuffling of cloth shifting. Zoro freezes, and tries to identify the source of the sound. It’s somewhere ahead of him, so he creeps forward slowly until he reaches the end of the hallway. Cautiously peaking around the corner, he sees light spilling from a small lamp on a desk in front of him. There’s a guard lounging in the  chair, feet indolently up on the desk, reading something on the small device in his hand.

Unfortunately, Zoro must have made a noise, because something causes the guard to look up. There’s no time for negotiation – in between one breath and the next, Zoro is next to the guard, and then the hapless man is on the floor. Blood spills sluggishly from the wound in his neck, where Zoro has embedded the glass shard he kept from his broken prison. The man is definitely dead.

Ten minutes later, Zoro’s wearing the guard’s non-descript blue shirt and black pants. His hair is now brown, courtesy of the spilled blood all over the floor – the red mixes with his natural green to form a completely innocuous brown. He has no swords – the only weapon he has is a non-lethal stun gun the guard had on his belt. He does not, at least to the casual observer, look much like the pirate (hunter) Roronoa Zoro.

In the main foyer, Zoro finds a cloakroom which, happily, contains a cloak. It is black and hooded and probably belonged to the dead guard but who really cares. Using the guard’s keys to unlock the front double doors, Zoro’s out into the night.

 

* * *

 

The museum’s in a deserted part of town, so Zoro weaves his way through streets as surreptitiously as he can until he finds signs of life. There’s some sort of dockyard, spilling golden light into the otherwise quiet and dark streets. Zoro insinuates himself behind some nearby crates and takes stock of the situation.

The large vehicle centre stage is definitely shaped like a sailing ship, but there’s no water in sight. There are several masts, but where sails should be there’s just some sort of sail-shaped empty metal frame. Zoro can see a large engine clinging like a barnacle to the hull (he assumes there’s a matching one on the other side) that is vaguely reminiscent of Sunny’s cola-powered engines. Whatever the ship is, it’s clearly going somewhere, and that somewhere is somewhere else, which is all Zoro needs right now.

Soft fingers of red and orange light are beginning to highlight the edges of the buildings. Dawn is coming, and it’s probably not a good idea for Zoro to be in the vicinity when sunlight exposes his bloody jailbreak. There is a buzzing hive of people loading cargo onto the ship, clearly in preparation for an early morning departure.

This is Zoro’s chance – when no one’s really looking, he saunters out, grabs a random box, and heads up the ramp like he knows where he’s going. He ends up in the cavernous hold of the weird ship, full of crates and boxes of all sizes. He puts the box down with its fellows, and looks around for a place to hide. This is not Zoro’s ordinary _modus operandi._ Zoro fights his problems, and then they go away – he and Luffy have this in common.

Had. Had that in common. Luffy is gone and Zoro is abandoned and he has no idea where he is or where anyone else is, so Zoro is going to find someplace to hunker down and stowaway until things resolve themselves into something more sensical.

In the hold there are several adjoining smaller storage rooms whose doors are, much to Zoro’s frustration, mostly locked. Except – _ah_ – this one isn’t. Zoro quickly slips inside the cabin, which is probably more accurately described as a cabinet, and shuts the door behind him, as softly as he can.

The thick wood muffles the bustle going on outside, and Zoro’s breath stutters with adrenaline in the sudden silence. He drags a large-ish box over to block the door – just in case – and sinks with some relief onto the floor in one corner of the room to await the departure of the ship.

 

* * *

 

There’s a small porthole set into the outer wall, and from his corner Zoro watches the light gradually get brighter as the sun rises. A whistle pierces through the entire ship, and the walls and floor rumble and vibrate as the engines are fired up. Through his small window, Zoro sees the roofs of the buildings drop away as the ship, literally, lifts off –

– and Zoro’s like, _okay, flying ship, sure_ , he’s a man of the world, he’s been to Skypeia.

But the golden light of the dawn sky smudges into a deep black speckled with stars as the ship _keeps rising_ and Zoro, gradually, realises something impossible.

The ship is heading into space.

He’s a stowaway on a _space_ ship.

In space.

Zoro’s mind attempts to make sense of this piece of information. Sure, he’s familiar with the concept of space travel – Usopp had a penchant for stories set on different planets, usually involving some sort of ravenous alien life-form – but the Grand Line had seemed weird enough to satisfy anyone’s craving for other worlds. And in any case, even top-secret government technology was nowhere near advanced enough for space travel.

It’s starting to become less about _where_ the fuck he is, and more about _when_ the fuck he is.

For the past few hours, Zoro had been very deliberately Not Thinking About It. But now, in this dark and confined space where the only sound is that of Zoro’s own traitorous breaths, he is forced into stillness for the first time since he woke up.

Zoro’s heartbeat speeds up.

Zoro had seen a cargo ship being loaded by a bunch of uninspiring dock workers. Nothing special, nothing monumental. Like this happened all the time. Like space travel happens all the time. It doesn’t make sense. All this time couldn’t have passed while Zoro lay dead. Luffy had been taken from them _yesterday_ , Zoro had _seen it_ , _remembers it_ , clear as a clean blade-

Stars blur in the porthole, as the ship accelerates to impossible speeds.

Zoro curls in on himself. His breathing is too fast, ragged gasps dragging out of his ribcage. What little strength he’s been running on is giving out. And it’s unsurprising, if he’s been dead for – what? Five years? Ten? His power is not a scratch on what he remembers it, his movements sluggish, his responses slow. He knows he needs to train.

Get stronger. Wreak revenge.

Zoro huddles into himself tighter. His tenuous control is slipping. He is incapable, and as weak and useless in actuality as he felt he was that fateful day. His nakama are missing, Luffy is gone, and Zoro is lost – in space and time.

Grief takes hold of his every spare thought and he’s crippled by it – prone on the floor, paralysed with rage and fear. He partly wants to scream and cry and weep just to release the tension that’s been building, horrible and intense and the strongest desire for blood he’s ever experienced. He’s _hurting_ but _furious._

_How could they take Luffy from us?!_

Zoro has no plan. Right now all he knows is the intangible need for destruction. And really, he doesn’t care how long it’s been. He doesn’t care if the crew had wreaked a revenge so horrible his suicidal attack had paled in comparison. He will hunt down anyone remaining – if they were at the execution, if they knew about it, if they obeyed the orders given by the commanders, and the commanders themselves – every single marine would pay. And those that supported the marines, the Shichibukai, the world-government-allied islands, everyone. He wouldn’t draw his punishment out, he wasn’t greedy. He would live merely on the fear in their eyes as they saw who had come for them, and they knew their death. And if they were no longer alive, he’d carry the sword through to their children, their grand-children, their great-grand-children. However long it took, whatever he had to do, he would be sated.

That Luffy would not approve does occur to him. Luffy had always been more into personalised justice than wholescale slaughter. But Luffy had violated the right to dictate Zoro’s morality the moment he’d let himself be killed (and he had _let himself be killed_ ). Whatever sway Luffy held over Zoro had disappeared the moment those swords had come down, and Zoro had breathed blood and anger until the bullet severed his heartstrings. He would do this as a favour to himself back then, and come what may.

The Pirate King _died,_ and Zoro owes him _nothing_.

But this world is still alien. He needs information – who to look for, how to fight against what weapons. He must make some sort of plan, find out what he’s up against-

Reason is rapidly drowned out beneath another wave of grief. His self-control is only there to stop himself from self-harm and does nothing to quell his mental agony. He bites his tongue, tastes blood and sees twin blades dripping red. They become his own, and he swears he feels the steel at his throat, damning him for his weakness.

Reliving the memories behind flickering eyelids, Zoro makes no noise. Rigid and hunched, lit by starlight, he attempts to control his own demons – to bend them to his will and turn their power to help him instead of hinder.

 

* * *

 

Several hours later, Zoro is flat on his back on the floor, sweat-covered and eyes fever-bright. But his heartbeat has slowed to regular, even levels. He is winning, for now.

 

* * *

 

The space-ship lands an indeterminate amount of time later, and Zoro manages to get himself off the ship and out of the docks – land-locked and sheltered, no sea – without anyone stopping him or even really noticing his presence.

By the looks of the light, it’s still relatively early in the morning. Either Zoro has travelled a very, very long way, or he spent more than a day as a stowaway. At this point either possibility is plausible.

Zoro also has no idea where he is, but to be honest, this is not an unusual state of affairs for him. In search of information, or just some sort of clue as to what the hell has happened, Zoro sets off down a street at random.

 

* * *

 

The destination of the cargo ship on which he’d stowed away is a city with a clear import/export focus. Zoro walks past warehouse after warehouse for several blocks beyond the docks, where a mix of human and obviously robotic peoples are unloading or loading boxes or furniture or strange artifacts. Zoro’s met pacifistas before, so he takes the robots in his stride. If he pretends hard enough, this is just another strange island on the Grand Line.

Eventually the scenery starts to change to offices, and then to shops. Zoro picks streets that seem to have the most people, which might be a bad idea – are they not looking for him? – but it also helps him blend in, and, eventually, leads to what appears to be the main square of the city.

There’s an incredibly odd looking fountain in the centre of the square. It’s a cube, with water cascading down all four exposed sides, but images are being projected onto the water as it falls. They flicker past incredibly quickly – a man smiling, a dog begging, a plate of food, a woman tossing her hair – and Zoro can’t actually work out what their purpose is.

A few people mill around the fountain, waiting to meet up with someone or talking on den den mushis. To his left, Zoro sees an enormous shopping complex which he wants nothing to do with, and which looks to be still closed anyway. Ahead of him is a building that is almost certainly the city’s administrative offices, because apparently even the architects of the future can’t disguise bureaucracy, and to his right is a sleek grey building with neon-etched writing sprawled diagonally across half its frontispiece.

The writing reads ‘Library’. Zoro walks in.

It doesn’t look like any library he’s ever been to – no books, no atmosphere of hushed reverence, just several rows of some sort of viewing machine with a few people seated behind them, typing or reading on the screen. Zoro freezes for a moment in the relative quiet of the building, but no one looks up or accuses him of stealing himself, so he relaxes slightly and heads for a terminal mostly hidden from the front door, ignoring the automaton behind the front desk that twitches to watch him.

_Finally, some information_. He sits down in front of the unfamiliar interface and stares at it for a couple of seconds. There’s a welcome message, and some advertisements for services the library offers, and he’s got no idea what to do.

A flurry of activity occurs in his peripheral vision, and he turns to see a small, sticky child of indeterminate gender vault itself up onto the seat next to his. The child stabs at the screen, which morphs into a collection of letters, from which the kid rapidly enters in their choice. Reams of text flash up, which the kid expertly shuffles around until they find what they’re looking for, then hops down off the chair and disappears somewhere into the building.

Zoro turns back to his own screen, and taps the same first button the kid did.

_‘Search_ ’.

Okay.

Right.

Rows of letters pop up. Clumsily,  Zoro types what he wants to know about.

M – O – N –

His fingers are almost too large for the on-screen keys, and the layout is non-alphabetical and unintuitive.

 – F –F – Y

Press _OK_ to continue.

The screen changes abruptly, and there he sees ‘Monkey D. Luffy’ in large letters and his captain’s bounty poster and reams of text. The library takes a whimsical approach, and has the information laid out as if in a book. Zoro presses the edge of the screen where an arrow is shown, and pages flip in 2D in front of him.

He pages through the information. He knows all this; Luffy’s childhood, his known associates, he was there for all the adventures. He gets to the end, the last page.

> _Death:_
> 
> _Monkey D. Luffy was executed using the twin blades of justice. Despite heavy security, Luffy’s crew managed to infiltrate the facility in what is assumed to have been an attempt to prevent his execution. This was to no avail – they arrived perhaps seconds too late. Once the furore of this interruption died down, the Pirate King’s body was declared medically dead by the Chief Medical Officer of the Marines and disposed of in an undisclosed manner._
> 
> _For more information, see:_
> 
> _ Execution – Traditional Style _
> 
> _ Pirate King – Myth _
> 
> _ Death Day Massacre _

Zoro growls softly, causing the person seated a few spaces over to look up curiously. _Dammit._ There is nothing here he doesn’t know, that he hadn’t seen with his own eyes. That he doesn’t remember so vividly it makes his vision grow grey around the edges with recall-

He shakes his head, breathes. He returns to the search box and painstakingly types in ‘Straw Hat Pirates’, bringing up another wall of text. This entry is briefer than the previous, and is headed by links next to each of the crew’s names. At the end, Zoro finds what he’s looking for:

> _The subsequent confusion resulting from the deaths of both Monkey D. Luffy and Roronoa Zoro enabled the rest of the Straw Hat Pirates to escape. In the following years there was much speculation amongst conspiracy theorists as to the degree of involvement the notoriously anarchical crew had in the subsequent massive internal investigation conducted by the World Government and the purging of several prominent Marines. However, there is little to no information of the activities of the Straw Hat crew after they escaped, and the pirate crew appeared to have been disbanded. Isolated sightings of individual crew members would occasionally be reported, but they were never confirmed. It is almost certain that the second Pirate King’s crew died in hiding._
> 
> _This page last edited on-_

The date on the page blurs before Zoro’s eyes, as he stares at the screen uncomprehendingly. His breath stutters out once, and then his lungs stop working.

It’s been almost a _century_.

The crew – his nakama. Not just Luffy, but _everybody_.

_Out with a whimper_ , whispers his mind, with a by now overwhelmingly familiar edge of hysteria. The grief he’d barely managed to suppress in the dark of cargo ship’s hold breaks through his flimsy defences, and Zoro barely makes it out of the library and into a narrow alleyway beside it before he collapses against the wall, heart beating rabbit-fast.

The crew that he should have protected, were dead. The selfishness of his actions, before acknowledged only in the periphery, hits him fully. Every single person he had known, had cherished, had loved, were long since decayed into _nothing_ , an unmemorable death undeserving because _he_ wasn’t strong enough to hold it together to hold them together.

Unaware of the keening noise he’s making, unaware of curling in on himself with his hand clutched to the scar above his heart, Zoro adds this to his list of sins. He lets the guilt overtake him, and drown him, because feeling as if he’s being shot all over again, ripped in two because his family is gone and never coming back – it’s not going halfway to making up for the crime of what he’s done. And more than that – because Luffy had, after all, left them the same way – Zoro’s selfishness in trying to get out of the grief he’d’ve felt if he’d thought of anyone else but himself. If he’d thought _at all_.

And this time, Zoro doesn’t fight it. He releases everything he’d been holding back, surrenders his self-control, and accepts the punishment from the only person still around to hand it out. Grief, fear, anger, pain, bloodlust, rage, despair. He gorges himself on self-pity, and purges it entirely, he keeps only what gives him strength. Because now not only does he have his captain to avenge, but every single one  of his nakama. Reaching deeper in himself to the darkness he sometimes drew his strength from and that constantly calls to him, he feels something in himself s l o w

and

_snap._

_Regroup, Roronoa_. For real now, he swears, this will be who he is – a manifestation of hell and revenge for the lives of his nakama. He takes the grief he tried to dodge through suicide by marine as due penance, for not standing strong for his nakama, for not holding up Luffy’s legacy in his greying years like Rayleigh did for his captain. One last apology: Luffy, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook-

Brook.

_Brook_. Who ate the Yomi Yomi devil fruit. Who was (is?) immortal. Who would still be alive if you buried him six feet under. Who was strong enough to have held together throughout the loss and death of his first crew, who would be strong enough to hold himself together through the death of the second. _He_ should be still alive.

Zoro uncurls himself, and finally breathes again. Assuming Brook is alive, and that Zoro can find him, is a long shot, but Zoro’s died and been resurrected, and it’s as good a place as any to start. He needs an ally, someone who knows this world. And if this time his revenge is to be complete – which it will, he knows this as he once knew he’d be the world’s greatest swordsman, as Luffy would be Pirate King – he’s going to need some help. This time, he’ll do it properly.

Now: if you were a 9 foot tall talking skeleton with a giant afro, where would you hide?

 

* * *

 

Despite making a resolution about What To Do Next for what feels like the millionth time, Zoro is really not coping well. He wanders the streets in a fugue, this time vaguely picking directions that seem to hold the least people.

The sun makes its passage across the sky. Zoro wanders, and wonders. Where is Brook? Where is _Zoro_?

At some point during his aimless plodding, he realises that he probably should have gone back into the library and gotten some information about where he is and what’s happened to other people since he’s been dead.

_Why didn’t I think of that?_

Too late now.

His thoughts are slow, sluggish. He hasn’t slept in too long. His tomb in the museum seems like an age away, and apparently the last time he went to sleep could be counted in centuries. Zoro is empty of energy, drained of hope, run out of fumes and eeking madness.

Which is why Zoro is halfway down the block when something his tired brain had noticed makes its way through the haze and gets his attention. He backtracks, until he’s standing in front of some sort of tattoo parlour.

The shop’s window is crowded with posters, presumably showcasing the wares for sale. Several people are shown with elaborate tattoos – face, chest, arm – and a wide variety of piercings. Others have more esoteric enhancements, like the man with synthetic fibrous lights instead of hair, or the woman with too many fingers. What has arrested Zoro’s attention, however, is the picture of the smiling man who is spreading his hands in front of himself, except instead of normal hands, fleshless bone extends out of his shirt cuffs.

Zoro tries the door of the shop, but finds it locked. He backs up and squints at the opening hours, then at the shop’s name, then at the sky. Oh. The sun is setting. Close of business.

Since this is literally the only thing Zoro has to go on right now, he can’t leave. He knows he won’t find his way back. He goes as far as the end of the block, and finds a dead-end alley that all the nearby shops and businesses seem to use for garbage can storage. Zoro finds his way to the back wall, shuffles a few cans around so he’s not immediately visible to passers-by, and hunkers down. Crouching behind the garbage cans like a rat, Zoro waits until the sun sets completely, but no one disturbs him.

Deciding he’s approximately safe for now, Zoro eases himself onto his side, and stills his body. Forces his heart to beat slower, his breaths to even out. It’s not comfortable, or warm, and it smells a bit, but Zoro’s slept on battlefields – he doesn’t care.

His brains runs in circles for a while, but his exhaustion is so bad that he can’t hold onto any thought for more than a few seconds. The last coherent thought he has is that the last time he closed his eyes, he was dead.

Zoro sleeps.

 

* * *

 

He starts awake for no discernible reason. The sun in back out, and it’s at least mid-morning.

Zoro unfolds himself rather stiffly, his muscles deeply unhappy about spending fifteen hours on cold stone. Zoro stretches, rolls his neck and his shoulders, and fruitlessly rubs the skin on the left side of his body, which has gone corpse-cold and half-numb.

Once he has most of his joints back in action, he finds his way back to the tattoo parlour, where the door now opens when he pushes on it.

“Yeah, hang on!” a voice yells from a backroom in response to the jingle of the doorbell.

Zoro waits, standing in the middle of the shop, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Alright, what can I do for you?” A slim, dark-haired woman steps out to stand behind the counter. Every single inch of her exposed skin is tattooed, and the tips of her two pigtails glow, one pink and one blue. She has a neutral, bored expression on her face, which changes to one of wary suspicion when she sees Zoro. Zoro automatically notices that both her hands disappear beneath the counter, and stay there.

Well, it’s not really surprising, is it? By now Zoro’s cloak is distinctly ragged and dusty. He’s wearing another man’s clothes which don’t fit all that well, his hair has an unpleasant brittle look to it, and he might smell a bit from his night among the garbage cans. Zoro’s not quite sure what he looks like, but it sure as shit isn’t like a respectable citizen.

Zoro opens his mouth, coughs, and tries again. “I saw, in your window, the man with the, uh,” Zoro spreads his hands in front on him, mimicking the pose of the half-skeleton man in the poster.

“Yeah, we only have the equipment for minor stuff. We don’t do bone-jobs. That’s more for aesthetic, you know?” the woman says, prepared to be civil but still guarded.

Zoro really doesn’t know. “Who does do,” Zoro hesitates around the bizarre word, “bone-jobs?” He reasons that if there are people who look like that, then maybe Brook is among them. It’s all he’s got.

The woman sucks air through her teeth. “You could try Amplio? Man, if you want something done there’ll be someone there who’s gonna do it to you. Just so long as you pay ‘em.” The woman gives Zoro a sceptical look at this, which he ignores, because never, in any of his lives, has Zoro looked like he had money.

“How do I get there?”

The woman shrugs. “Find a spacer going in that direction. Ought to be a couple, always tourists and crap wanting to go.”

A spacer. Amplio is not on another street, it’s on another goddamn _planet_.

“Where can I find a spacer?”

The woman looks at him disbelievingly. She steps away from the counter and folds her arms, obviously having decided that Zoro is a weirdo, but not a dangerous weirdo.

“Uh, the docks?” The ‘duh’ is unspoken but heavily implicit.

Zoro looks blank. The woman sighs and, clearly wanting him out of her shop, points down the street. “It’s that way. You might wanna catch a cab, it’s pretty far.”

Zoro thanks her, and heads off in the direction she had pointed. More or less.

 

* * *

 

Zoro spends another half-day wandering the city. Eventually, and after asking several nonplussed citizens for directions, he does find his way to the dockyard.

Well, _a_ dockyard. It’s definitely not the same place he landed at, when he first came to this city. For one, it’s a lot less shiny and a lot less clean, and a great deal smaller. Instead of the bustle and noise of ships constantly being loaded and unloaded, there’s a lot of not much happening. Lackadaisical dockhands lean on random pieces of cargo and smoke, glaring more by habit than actual malice at passers-by.

Zoro ignores what could generously be called the main reception office where a harassed looking young woman straightens her stewardess hat and thrusts papers at a seedy merchant captain, and instead wanders into a nearby bar. Disreputable, he fits right in. There are maybe only two or three other patrons, quietly undertaking some post-prandial drinking.

Zoro ignores the dinky little robot barman which wobbles up to him, in need of repair. A customer hails it from the other side of the bar and, bumping into Zoro’s leg twice it manages to do a U-turn and veer off, in the wrong direction. One of its hover-motors chooses this moment to fail, and it spends the rest of its shift unable to turn right.

Zoro, deprived of dragging information out of a non-existent barman (his usual method) seeks out the most suspicious character in the joint and sits opposite him.

On a two-seater table, in a dark corner, a hooded and unshaven man nurses a tumbler and glowers at the dark-haired stranger opposite him. Zoro doesn’t look much like a friendly drinking partner.

“Whaddya want?” comes the slurred objection.

“I want a spacer to Amplio. Know anybody around here going that way?”

“You oughta ask at the reception office. Nice bit o’ stuff they gots there, she’ll set you straight, once she pulls the stick out of her arse.”

“Don’t want that sort of ship.”

“Ain’t no other kind, mate. All legal ‘round here.”

“I reckon there are ways around that.”

“Bullshit. You don’t know what you’re talking about, greenhorn like you. Probably never even been on a real spacer. You go be cabin-boy to some pansy-ass marine and you’ll enjoy it, fucker,” the man jeers.

His beverage spills on the floor as Zoro suddenly lunges forward, hands fisting in the other man’s lapels and pulling him forward nose-to-nose, sneering into his face.

The robot barman attempts to approach them, but turns left into the men’s room instead. It’s signals for assistance are registered only by the nearby automatic toilet-flusher as some enterprising patron of the bar had long ago snapped off its main antennae.

The other patrons don’t even look up.

“Listen to me, asshole,” Zoro says lowly, threateningly, head singing with adrenaline, finally, _finally_ feeling something other than hurt and numb. “I want on a ship. Not a merchant, and sure as hell not a fucking marine. Now something tells me you know where I can find myself a ship like this and unless you spill the beans this minute I’m going to smash your ugly fucking head into this table until you do.”

The man had clearly underestimated the mad look in Zoro’s eyes. But he did not frequent this bar without some knowledge of the usual activities, so he had his double-pointed half-metre long obsidian dagger at Zoro’s throat as soon as his glass hit the floor. Zoro seems to be taking no notice of this fact.

“Well, fucker?” Zoro demands.

“Go to hell!” The other man presses the knife forward.

Adrenaline and blood are Zoro’s favourite drugs. In seconds, the double-pointed knife is in Zoro’s hand, and one blade is carving patterns on the other man’s cheek.

Reeking of terror, the hooded man stutters out “Clem! Clem at Dock 4B!” Satisfied, Zoro slams the knife into the table, one point down, one point up.

And then he drops the man. On top of the other point.

Zoro walks out in search of further information.

The robot barman, reversing out of the bathroom, begins to ineffectually mop up the blood oozing from the man on the table. Malfunctioning audio equipment interprets dying gurgles as an order, and another whiskey and soda is added to the dead man’s tab.

 

* * *

 

Knowing he needs to find Clem-at-Dock-4B is all well and good but there is one glaring problem: money. Zoro highly doubts that ‘Clem’ is going to give him passage out of the goodness of his heart. Fortunately, Zoro’s a pirate, which is close enough to a thief, and he’s also an ex-bounty hunter, which means he can spot possibly lucrative criminals only slightly less accurately than Nami.

Zoro finds a nearby bench (it does not, even for a second, occur to him to flee the scene of the crime) and sits down, stretching his legs out in front of him. He waits.

 

* * *

 

Several hours later (Zoro is _good_ at waiting), darkness has fallen and the bar has picked up quite a few more customers. Zoro’s been mediating, not that it’s helping pull together the fraying edges of his heart and mind, but hey, it passes the time.

Two men, probably sailors (‘sailors’), swing around the corner, laughing and nudging each other. They head into the bar, passing Zoro’s bench along the way, and pinging Zoro’s petty criminal radar. He gets up, and follows them inside.

The bar is distinctly more lively. Someone’s playing music, almost all the seats in the place are taken, and the body Zoro had left behind has disappeared. The small automatic machine barman has been replaced with another robot, though one that is clearly far more sophisticated in order to deal with the night crowd. A human-sized mass of tarnished chrome and attachments, this new barman serves drinks and takes payment with rapid efficiency.

One of Zoro’s targets has already gotten the barman’s attention, and is clutching a tankard of beer with the eager expression of one about to have a nice, cool drink after a long, hard day’s work.

Zoro walks up to the man, grabs the beer out of his hand, and downs the lot in one go. The alcohol burns down his throat like acid, and when Zoro slams the glass dramatically onto the bar he’s actually just trying not to throw up. Alcohol on a very empty stomach is not a fantastic idea.

“What. The FUCK?” the man screams at Zoro.

“I was thirsty,” Zoro says, in the same tone of voice he uses when Sanji’s being a pissy little shit and Zoro wants to start something. (Very carefully, Zoro pushes that thought away before it makes the churning in his gut worse.)

The man hauls back like he’s about to punch Zoro in the face, but the barman appears behind him and grips the man’s wrist with a pincer like arm.

“You should take this outside,” the robot says in a voice completely without inflection, yet which brooks no argument.

“Yeah,” says the man, shaking free. “Yeah, let’s do _that._ ”

He shoves Zoro roughly backwards towards the door, a challenge on his face. Zoro makes an ‘after you’ gesture, and follows the man outside into the gravelled courtyard.

No courteous duelling here. No sooner than they are outside does the man repeat his motion from before, drawing back and aiming his fist at Zoro’s face.

Zoro ducks, and is about to return a punch of his own when, to his mild surprise, he finds his arms locked behind him. The man’s friend had followed them out the bar and is joining in, holding Zoro in place. The other man is not small, and he’s got a good grip on Zoro’s forearms, twisted behind his back.

The first man grins unpleasantly. Zoro has time to notice that his teeth are black, before he tries his punch again. Zoro jerks his head to the side, and the man’s fist connects instead with his friend’s face.

_Amateurs_.

Dazed, the friend staggers back, allowing Zoro to duck out of his grip. Zoro rounds on both men before they can gather their wits, grabs them by the back of their collars, and brings their heads together with a violent, fleshy, impact.

The one who had been punched drops immediately to the ground, unconscious. The other one, the man whose beer Zoro had drunk, and clearly the one with the harder skull, is still upright and staggering in a small circle.

Zoro reaches out, grabs him by the shoulder to steady him, and punches him square in the face with probably more force than is necessary. Zoro feels the crunch of bone beneath his fist – _definitely_ broke the nose – and the second man, too, drops down and doesn’t get up again.

Zoro wipes the blood off his hand on one of the men’s jackets, and then rapidly goes through their pockets. His hunch had been right – the men were in a good mood because they were, momentarily, flush. Zoro turns out several bright blue chips that sparkle even in the dim light and he knows, immediately, that this is money.

In a vague concession to law-enforcement, Zoro drags the men across the way to a stack of large boxes waiting to be loaded onto a ship. He opens two and dumps the men’s bodies in one each. Hopefully by the time they wake up – _if_ they wake up, Zoro’s not really in a mood to pull his punches – either Zoro or the men will be too far away to cause trouble.

 

* * *

 

Because this is dockside, Zoro doesn’t have to wander far before he finds a motel. The bored looking desk clerk behind a screened off counter barely looks up as he enters.

“Rooms are two-hundred New Beli a night. No hookers, no Slack, no illegals, and no noise past midnight,” she drones, finding whatever is one the screen in front of her far more interesting than Zoro.

Zoro slides one of the blue chips through the gap in the window, and then, as the clerk just stares at him, slides another through. She grabs the two chips, and returns a key.

“Room eight, up the stairs, on the left,” she says, and then turns away and dismisses him completely.

Room eight is not great. It has a bed, with what only the most generous would call a blanket (no pillow), and the smallest bathroom that Zoro has seen outside of a ship. Given, however, that Zoro has spent last night on the ground next to literal trash, he’s not going to complain.

Tipping his haul of blue crystals onto the bed, Zoro counts out twenty-three in total. If each stands for one hundred of whatever ‘New Beli’ is, his mugging has netted him a total of twenty-three hundred in cash. He hopes it’s enough for Clem-at-Dock-4B.

After a quick shower (there’s no hot water, and he avoids getting his hair wet), Zoro sprawls on top of the bed and attempts to sleep. It takes a while.

His dreams are not pleasant.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Zoro finds warehouses with the labels Docks 1, 2, 3 and then 4; then he finds Dock 4A, and then 4B. Sitting in 4B is a spaceship a good deal smaller than the cargo ship he’d arrived on – somewhere between the size of the Going Merry and the Thousand Sunny – but with the same basic shape. The metal hull is a bit battered and patched, but otherwise the spacer looks to be in decent shape.

There’s no one about but a rather emaciated man, sitting on a box next to a ramp that leads onto the ship. Zoro approaches him.

“Are you Clem?”

“The fuck is wrong with you? Do I look like Clem?” the man says, with uncalled for hostility.

Zoro is saved from having to answer this absurd question by another voice which hails from somewhere on the ship.

“Someone down there? Whozzat?”

A round face appears over the ship’s railing, notices Zoro’s presence, and waves.

“I’m looking for passage to Amplio,” Zoro shouts up at him. The other man nods and begins to disembark.

The thin man gets off his box, mutters something foul under his breath, and walks, bow-legged, off in the direction of the warehouse’s office.

“I’m Clem,” the round-faced man says, appearing next to Zoro and huffing slightly. Clem is shaped like a small ball on top of a large ball. He is, to put it mildly, rotund. Zoro has the vague sense the man should be wearing a top hat.

“Don’t mind Mark, he’s a bit… old-fashioned about these things. So, Amplio, huh?” Clem looks at Zoro with sharp, intelligent eyes. Zoro nods.

“Well,” Clem draws the word out, “I just want to make it clear that our trade here in the import/export business is completely above board and I have the papers to prove it. Completely legal cargo – and passengers.”

“Legal cargo,” Zoro echoes.

“One hundred percent legal.”

Both Clem and Zoro nod at each other.

“Right,” says Clem, rubbing his hands together, “now that we’ve got that cleared up, I can tell you that I can absolutely take you to Amplio. Fare is one thousand New Beli one way, and I’ll need to see your papers.”

“What papers?”

“It’s like that is it?” Clem squints at Zoro. “You aren’t in trouble with the law, are you?”

“No,” Zoro says. He’s not entirely sure if it’s a lie or not, because he did use to have a bounty but while the posters are pretty clear on the whole ‘dead or alive’ thing, they don’t say much about ‘dead _and_ alive’.

“Well in that case the fare is two thousand, chips.”

“Okay,” says Zoro, a little relieved that he doesn’t have to find another ship.

“It’s a fair price for what you’re asking, I won’t- What? Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Chips now?”

Zoro shrugs his acceptance, and counts twenty blue crystals into Clem’s cupped palms. The man’s face gets, if possible, rounder and shinier.

“A scholar and a gentleman, exactly the sort of person I like to do business with!” Clem is all affability.

Clem leads Zoro on board the ship, and then into a small room in the hold area. It contains a few benches and not much else. No windows.

“With no papers you’ll have to stay down here for the duration of the trip,” Clem explains. “Don’t go peaking your head out and causing trouble for me. We’re making another stop along the way, so it’ll be about two days standard before we get to Amplio. Don’t worry, we won’t let you starve!”

Zoro is reminded that he actually hasn’t had anything to eat since he woke. His last meal, he realises with a start, was Sanji’s ratatouille.

“We’re just waiting for the go-ahead from the dock-master and then we’re off. Make yourself comfortable!”

Zoro barely notices Clem leave and shut the door behind him. The roaring in his ears is back. Zoro slumps down on a bench, staring at nothing. He doesn’t notice the ship leave, because the grief is awake again, eating him raw from the inside and leaving him hollow.

 

* * *

 

It has been barely three days since Zoro was resurrected, and found he’d lost his nakama.

The world may have lived decades, but for Zoro, only three days have passed since Zoro watched his captain die.

Did Rayleigh resent Rogers? Zoro sometimes wonders. Gol D. and Silvers; it’s hardly like the Universe was being subtle. And yet the first Pirate King had left his crew without giving them any chance at a farewell. Left behind, how did Rayleigh cope with this dark, sucking void Zoro feels in his chest? Was it not the same for them? Rayleigh wasn’t there, didn’t see it. By choice or by accident – Zoro’s never been too clear on that. But the first mate to the original Pirate King didn’t _see_ his captain _die_. Zoro _did_.

Perhaps Rayleigh’s task was always going to be to foster the next pirate king, carry Gol D. Rogers’ legacy through in the form of Luffy, after it was made horrendously clear that Rogers’ actual son would not be the heir to One Piece. Zoro wonders if Luffy expected the same service of him. But there is still the gaping question underlying Luffy’s actions that led to his death. Rogers was apparently dying before his execution anyway – did Luffy’s liberal use of Gear, and his trades with Ivankov and Law finally catch up to him? Did he think Chopper couldn’t fix him?

But Luffy had bottomless faith in his crew, and Zoro knows self-sacrifice has never been his captain’s style (that’s more Sanji’s poison). The swordsman also cannot comprehend a world in which the marines could actually overpower his King-captain, to the extent of his death. It just doesn’t work that way – in Zoro’s mind, Luffy is _always_ fated to survive. Perhaps, Zoro thinks, with a sweeping wave of guilt that leaves him short of breath, it was the failure of his crew – of his strongest, his first mate – that meant things turned out the way they did.

Back around again to guilt. The stars flash by as Zoro lives in the past, and slowly falls apart.


	2. Chapter 2

Sanji’s standing against the bar, smoking idly, blowing the vapour gently into the air and watching it rise to eddy slowly in swirls against the ceiling. A precious few moments before opening time, when he actually has the time to think, and muse, before the hordes stampede in demanding food. His place is always popular, but only with the locals. It’s kind of run down, the _Baratie II_ , (although by rights it should be V or VI by now), so you have to know the food is good – no, the best – on the entire planet, and possibly the universe. He happens to know for a fact that his dishes are a thousand times better than you’ll get from any of the machine-run places nowadays.

“Hey, Janis, stop day-dreaming and start prepping. We’ve got money to make.”

He offers the barmaid a tired smile. Janis, an anagram of his actual name, had started as a joke, when he needed something to call himself that people wouldn’t recognise. He still held on tight to who he’d been in his first life, but through necessity had needed to make another face for himself. He’d kicked the few assholes that had the nerve to suggest it was girly, and after that people had just accepted it.

The barmaid that had summoned him so ingloriously is not a pretty little thing. She’s young-ish (in appearance, in any case, you never could tell these days, and it would be rude to ask a lady her age) and sturdy, suited to this rougher part of town. Sanji’s always polite and gracious to her, of course, as she’s a jewel in her way (if a little rough ‘round the edges), but his habit of going weak-kneed at the sight of luscious curves, or a pair of bright eyes, or a pair of glorious legs, or a pair of bouncing –

_ahem_

Anyway, this habit had suffered it’s blows, like most of his personality. No longer does he pounce and fawn as he had when he was younger (so _much_ younger). He’s seen too much to be stunned euphorically by the innocence of love. He’s seen it turn the meek into the bold, and the weak into the strong, but he’s also seen murder in its name. He’s been witness to, and been the cause of, carnage for love and loyalty’s sake.

He feels chastised by the death he’s done, the terror that grief had wrought upon his soul. In many ways, the _Baratie_ serves as penance, as it had done when he owed Zeff a life and a leg. Now in cooking for and serving others he seeks some sort of shape to this life, trying to be himself and whole rather than waiting for something larger than him to come along and give him meaning.

Sanji wonders if it will ever be enough, ever again.

He turns towards the kitchen, maudlin. Sanji knows that the bustle of the day will wipe these thoughts from his mind, enough he will sleep like a log, in any case. Although that might be through exhaustion. He stubs out the cigarette in a convenient ashtray. The addiction had long since ceased to be such, after the scientists removed that particular chemical from the tobacco used in cigarettes. Not that it really mattered, because with the medicine nowadays cancer was a joke, although the impoverished still died from it. He wonders how long it’s been since he tasted real tobacco, not the vat-grown genetically-modified crap they grew off-world and shipped throughout this universe for the failing smoker’s market. Because of the import costs, cigarettes had lately been growing more and more in price. He might have to quit altogether soon, because as many customers as he got, they were not the sort who could pay full price for anything, even a square meal. He charged what they could afford, and he survived that way.

It was the obligation that came with the _Baratie_ territory. His constant reminder were the murals that covered the walls, as faded as he was, but still clear in their depiction of water, sun and every single fish he could think of, edible or not, real or extinct. He’s been meaning to get it touched up, add a little colour. He knows someone who would probably do it for free.

Sanji straps on an apron and ducks behind the wall that screens the kitchen from the dining area. Across the restaurant, his assistant flips on the old vision-set in the corner that Sanji can hear but not see from the kitchen. She likes to catch the morning news during prep, since neither of them really have the time during the day. Sanji starts to take stock of what he needs to prepare to feed his hungry customers today.

His most popular dish in the morning is a breakfast sandwich, so he begins slicing tomatoes. The tacit skill required to make even, thin slices is pleasing to practice, and the task is comfortingly rote. A pleasant haze settles in his mind, and the nightmares that still wake him up in the middle of the night seem distant and unimportant. In the background, the morning news reporter reads through the headlines.

_“A controversial new artwork challenges the preconceived ideas of child-rearing, say experts.”_

He needs to wash the lettuce next, in preparation for assembling sandwiches as the orders come in. Not chopping it now, but only as needed, will help preserve freshness.

_“A small boy was rescued from the jaws of a refuse vehicle by a brave marine; claims, ‘I was just doing my job’.”_

Would two kilograms of bacon be enough to start off with, or should he start some more defrosting now? Recently he’d seen more night shift workers coming in, so maybe he should take a couple more packets out the freezer.

_“The world government has declared an increase in vigilance for all those based in the Vega II to IV areas following the alarming news_ …”

Three, no, four dozen eggs. He needs extra for the French toast.

“… _of a theft of the body of the infamous pre-Expansion pirate_ …”

He needs to remember, there’s a delivery of fish coming in this afternoon courtesy of a guy he helped out. He may need to connect the spare chest freezer to store it properly.

_“…Roronoa Zoro.”_

Sanji freezes, knife in the air. He’s hearing things. He must be.

He tears out from the kitchen, still gripping the knife, but the news has frustratingly moved on to sport.

“What was that?” Sanji asks his assistant, trying not to sound too jittery.

“Hmm? Something about a break in at the new museum on Vega IV. I dunno, these guys make it seem like the end of the world. I think they’re just really freaked someone managed to actually crack their security system. Though I wouldn’t think it’d be that high all the way out there.”

Biting back the sudden urge to scream, Sanji darts into his office, ignoring the querying noise his assistant makes. Discarding the knife in favour of his keyboard, Sanji leans over his desk, accesses his terminal and searches for today’s news.

“Come _on_.” Sanji growls at the screen as it slowly loads. He desperately wishes for a cigarette.

The news article, when it finally loads, doesn’t tell him much, but Sanji still feels like he’s been gut-punched. Following a donation bestowed in the will of some minor government dignitary, a small museum had been built on Vega IV to house what the article describes as ‘testaments to the triumphs of the righteous’. In essence: trophies won by the Marine force, of which the pièce-de-résistance was going to be an exhibit containing the actual bodies of four criminals. One step beyond death-masks, these bodies had been perfectly preserved and were supposed to act as a major tourist attraction for the area.

Except that several days ago – the government had forced a news blackout immediately after the event – someone had apparently broken into the museum and made off with one of the bodies. Specifically, with Roronoa Zoro’s body. The preserved, intact remains of Sanji’s long dead crewmate, which the government had apparently kept, _all this time_.

According to the article, there were no leads as to who was responsible for the theft.

Sanji sits down heavily on his desk chair, eyes staring unseeing.

It turns out there’s not much Sanji can do about this turn of events, at least not right now. He spends fifteen minutes staring at nothing, alternating between the gaping sense of loss he feels whenever he stops long enough to remember his captain and their swordsman, and an overwhelming sense of anger at the violation of Zoro’s body.

Zeff, the first man that Sanji had ever actually respected, didn’t use soft words or gentle actions towards Sanji. _His_ affection came in the form of kicks, mostly, but underlying it had been the rock-solid knowledge that Zeff would do anything for Sanji, regardless of whether the blond man felt he deserved it. Zoro and Sanji had a similar relationship when it came to showing each other they cared; that is, they didn’t, until it counted. When it came down to anything real, they were _nakama_. And Sanji _knew_ the shitty swordsman had his back, and considered Zoro one of his closest friends, though Sanji would have died before admitting it.

Turns out he didn’t have to, because it was Zoro who found his grave first.

Once, _after_ , in the dead of night when neither Sanji nor Chopper could sleep – back when they still slept aboard the same ship together – the little doctor had shamefully confessed to Sanji that he felt it had been his doctor’s duty to restrain Zoro, stop him rushing into battle in his fierce and pointless chase after their captain’s soul. Maybe, if he’d used his Zoan abilities, he could have held Zoro back long enough that their allies could have reached them while the swordsman was still alive.

The problem was, was that Luffy dying had taken on something of an inevitability to the crew in those grey days after the fact – really, could they imagine the Pirate King going any other way? Aging, slowing, snapping like old rubber? By some perverse logic, Luffy’s death was symmetrical with Roger’s, and somehow appropriate. Luffy had Roger’s straw hat, Roger’s smile, Roger’s title.

Roger’s death.

Zoro’s death, however, had been louder and far, far messier. The rest of the crew, already in shock, stood paralysed as their swordsman exposed his desperation and soul-deep desolation to God and everyone, and took as many lives as he could in the process. By the time they thought to join the fight, the enemy force had already overwhelmed Zoro. No one was very clear on what had been the cause of the final blow, but they all saw the green-haired man stagger, then fall to his knees, and finally topple forwards to lie in a bloody and mangled heap below the platform on which Luffy’s body lay.

Sanji had tried to get to him, Robin had tried to pull him out of there with her extra hands, Franky had tried to clear a path. But it was Chopper, in Brain Point, trying to use Scope to assess Zoro’s wounds, that saw the truth before any of them. When the doctor’s anguished cry cut across the battlefield, suddenly every Straw Hat there had understood that Zoro was beyond rescue.

Sanji understands Chopper’s regrets (they all have them), but the thing is, Sanji has a very clear image – and he really, really wishes he didn’t – of Zoro’s face after Luffy was executed. _Nothing_ was going to stop that man from killing himself, and for that Sanji might, actually, genuinely, for the first time since he’d met the marimo, sincerely _hate_ Roronoa Zoro.

“Are we actually going to open sometime in the next couple of hours, or do you need a personal day?”

Sanji is jolted out of his reverie by the sardonic voice of his assistant. She’s looking at him exasperated, but also concerned. He shakes his head and tries to pull himself together. The clusterfuck that is Roronoa Zoro – alive or dead – is going to have to wait. He has hungry customers to feed, regardless of his own personal six a.m. crisis. When the doors are closed and the dishes are washed, Sanji will find out what he can and try and contact the others, but for now he has his duties to perform.

 

* * *

 

By the time the smuggler’s ship lands at Amplio, Zoro’s got something of a handle on himself. Not much of one, but enough. Clem hustles Zoro off the ship with a wink and wave, and Zoro finds himself abandoned in the middle of Amplio’s arrivals and departures hub, which is enormous and bustling.

The first thing Zoro sees is a man lounging against a wall reading a newspaper, and wearing a lion mask. And then the man yawns in the absent-minded way that cats do, tongue stretching out lazily, teeth on display. Zoro very carefully smooths his face into blankness. _Yeah, not a mask_.

Sometime after Water 7, given the plethora of both devil fruits and bizarre hair-styles the Grand Line had going on, Usopp had come up with a game – devil fruit or over-zealous barber? It was a mildly amusing game for the crew to play when they were bored or waiting, and watching passers-by. The way the lion-man’s hair and beard blend into each other gives the very strong impression of a mane, which could either have been the work of a skilled hairstylist or the mark of a Zoan, were it not for the large sign behind the man that greeted newcomers with the words: ‘Welcome to Amplio: Home of Body-Hacking!’

So the answer, then, to the question ‘Devil Fruit or Barber?’ would be: neither.

Lion-man checks his watch, tosses his newspaper carelessly onto the ground and lopes off, tail swishing behind him. Zoro loses sight of him, jostled to the side as a group of girls with shopping bags pass, chattering and scattering brightly coloured feathers everywhere. Disoriented, the swordsman comes face to face with a business man who’s frowning at a small screen in his hand, tapping it furiously as his prehensile monkey tail swings his briefcase out of the way of the crowd. A woman with a distinctly reptilian cast to her face slinks past, her double lids briefly on display as she winks playfully in response to Zoro’s staring.

Zoro fishes himself out of the crowd and flattens himself against the nearest wall, making his way as surreptitiously as possible to the lobby. Nobody’s taking any notice of him; as the crowd swells and ebbs, all manner of imaginable body adjustments are on display. Not just animal adaptations – mechanical enhancements and cyborg parts are more obvious and more extreme in this place. A man with an outrageously large peacock tail, furled, strides past in a hurry, and almost takes a chunk out Zoro’s shin – each feather is made of metal, inlaid with glass or gems, and the edges razor sharp. A short lady with two heads berates a clerk selling coffee, though weirdly one of the heads is inert and waxy-looking. Several passengers, coming and going, have extra limbs – here and there someone with four legs like a bizarre human centaur, or three or four arms all busy with luggage, maybe an extra eye or two, occasionally extra fingers.

“Gyahaha! Quite a colourful crowd, isn’t it!” A voice booms nearby, making Zoro whirl to face the intruder in surprise.

The abject nature of the crowd had stunned Zoro, meaning he hadn’t noticed the arrival of this strange man. The man is dressed a bit like a barber pole, in an open jacket and pants of wide red and white vertical stripes. His hair is similarly striped, coiffed to a ridiculous height, and he has a megaphone looped into his belt. One hand holds several tourist brochures and maps, the other is gesturing wildly. What is possibly most disarming about him, however, is the large television screen set _into_ the man’s chest, flickering endlessly through the available channels. He’s not wearing a shirt, so anyone can see how scar tissue ridges around the device, gluing skin and screen together in a manner that Zoro, quite frankly, finds obscene.

“You must be new here,” the man says, peering forward in order to get a better look at Zoro’s face and figure, underneath his cloak and hood. Zoro draws back. “You look like you still have the regular number of limbs, at least! Gyahaha!”

“Say, you look like you could use a guide,” the man continues, oblivious to Zoro’s fuck-off body language. “I’m the station’s very own megaphone-man, one-and-only, and lemme tell you I am a one-stop-shop for all your tourist needs!”

Megaphone-man speaks at a volume that suggests he does not, actually, need a megaphone. Maybe he already has one embedded in his oesophagus; Zoro eyes the man’s throat suspiciously for any visible augmentations. The man also does not seem perturbed that the only response he’s gotten from Zoro has been distrustful glaring.

“You want a body-hack? I can tell where to get it, and who does the best work! If you’re just here for a looky-loo, I’ve got the best route planned out for you, prime-A-plus freaks on display, all shapes and sizes, yessir.” He waves a sheaf of printed maps in Zoro’s face.

Zoro swats at the paper, annoyedly, turning to go. Megaphone-man grips his arm, stopping him.

“Or maybe,” he says, in what he clearly imagines passes for a whisper, “you’re looking for something a little more in the line of,” leaning in, “a particular _personal_ _satisfaction_.”

Repulsed, Zoro jerks his arm out of megaphone-man’s grip.

“Hey, hey!” The man backs off, but only a step. “I’m not here to judge! We cater for _all sorts_ here, gyeheheh,” he sniggers.

Zoro really wants to leave all this fucking weirdness behind him and go and find his one remaining nakama, but in order to do that he does need some sort of direction. He grits his teeth and says, “I’m looking for the skeletons.” Zoro immediately regrets this as megaphone-man’s face lights up and his eyes get a sly look in them.

“So that’s your poison,” megaphone-man leers. He selects a pamphlet from his collection. “Well, I got you a map right here…” he trails off, waving the pamphlet around.

Zoro puts his hand out expectantly. Megaphone-man lowers the pamphlet, like he’s going to give it to Zoro, then abruptly snatches his hand back.

“And it can be all yours for the low-low price of a-one-a-hundred New Beli!”

At this, Zoro officially loses what little patience he has. He reaches out and grabs megaphone-man’s wrist, the one holding the map. The man, alarmed, tries to free himself, but Zoro’s grip is like iron. Brochures scatter as the man drops the rest of his stack in a bid to bring his other hand about to pry apart Zoro’s fingers, but it’s completely ineffectual.

“I think it should be free,” Zoro says lowly.

Megaphone-man looks around wildly, but several more ships have docked and the crowd of people in the lobby are far too concerned with their own business to mind his. Even if he were to yell, his voice would be drowned out in the din of talking, announcements, and ship’s engines.

Plus, there is the small problem of the large angry man threatening immediate bodily harm.

“I-I mean,” the man says, his voice now at a normal, if shaky, decibel level, “I could be persuaded to lower the price. Fifty-percent off? One-time-offer, never-to-be-repeated, deal-of-the-century?”

Though Nami might have admired the fact that the man is clearly a capitalist to the end, this is entirely the wrong thing to say. Zoro leans in, and the colours from the screen in the man’s chest flicker over the swordsman’s face. The television’s programming chooses this point to switch over to a news channel, which is covering a breaking news story about a theft on Vega IV.

The image of Zoro is projected onto Zoro himself. He looks cartoon, menacing, hyperreal and not real at all.

“How, do I get, to the skeleton quarter?” Zoro asks again, slowly, enunciating each word.

The man hesitates. Zoro increases his grip slightly, and feels the bones shift sweetly beneath the man’s skin. In a rush of pain, megaphone-man spits directions out: “Go west off the main square, keep going straight until you see skulls everywhere.”

Zoro nods and reaches up with his other hand to pluck the map out of megaphone-man’s now slack grip. He politely thanks the man and releases him, the salesman sinking down to the ground with a whimper while Zoro disappears into the crowd. It’s not all bad though; later, when megaphone-man’s doctor tells him he will need extensive reconstructive surgery to replace the bones Zoro’s grip had shattered, the man will take the opportunity to insist they chop the whole hand off and replace it with an actual megaphone instead.

 

* * *

Later in the day, Sanji’s den den mushi rings, with Nami on the other end.

“Sanji.”

“Nami-swan~!” Sanji is unable to suppress the surge of joy he feels at the sound of her voice. “How are you? Is everything okay?” he asks eagerly.

“Did you see the news?”

Oh. “Yes.”

“What the fuck, Sanji?”

Direct to the point, as always. So straightforward, his Nami.

“I have no idea,” Sanji replies. “I didn’t even _know_ that something like that existed.”

“Me neither, and you’d think an artifact of that worth would be hard to keep quiet.” Both of them are avoiding using words like ‘Zoro’s lifeless body’ or ‘our dead nakama’. “Oh, hang on, I’ve got another call.”

Nami puts Sanji on hold while she deals with her other call, and bizarrely up-beat polka music fills the room. Sanji aims a judgemental eye at his den den mushi, who manages to look ashamed but doesn’t do anything about it.

The phone picks ups again.

“It’s Robin!” Nami says, excitedly. “I’m making it a conference call.”

“Robin-chwan~!”

“Yes, hello Sanji.”

“Robin, do you know anything about what’s happened on Vega IV?” Nami asks.

“I don’t know very much, but I do have some information others might not be privy too. Perhaps it would be more efficient to contact all of the crew members at once? Let me see if I can get a hold of them.”

A short while later, Usopp, Chopper, and Franky have joined the call.

“Brook does not appear to be answering.”

“Probably sleeping off his last performance,” Usopp suggests.

There’s a resounding clang, which startles both Sanji and the den den mushi.

“Sorry! Dropped my hammer,” Franky says. “Anyway, it can’t be true, right? About Zoro. We would have heard something, surely?”

“I can’t believe it,” Chopper says softly. Glass clinks gently in the background, and there’s the soft susurration of stone on stone as Chopper grinds medicines in his mortar and pestle. Like Sanji’s customers, Chopper’s patients still need his help.

“Unfortunately, Chopper, it is true,” Robin confirms gravely.

“As expected, Robin knows all~!” Sanji interjects, burbling. Then, abruptly snapping out of it, he adds, “Why the hell was this kept so quiet?”

“The body, or the theft?” Robin queries. “Perhaps it would be best for me to relay my understanding of the situation and then we can see where we stand.”

There’s no disagreement, so Robin begins. “For a while after we escaped” – no one needs to ask _when_ she’s talking about – “there was a certain amount of chatter among the marine network about ‘artifacts’. I had originally assumed this referred to Zoro’s swords, or perhaps the Captain’s head.”

Sanji suppresses a shudder at this baldly morbid statement.

Robin continues. “Later it became clear that the ‘artifacts’ were in fact the bodies of several prominent criminals. After a bit of digging I managed to uncover an unambiguous reference to our swordsman. It would appear that the marines kept his body in order to make a more public example of him, given that his death was somewhat overshadowed by that of the Pirate King. However, this was before we joined forces with the Revolutionary Army in order to take down those responsible.”

And boy had Sabo been heartbreaking to look at. He’s still floating around somewhere, last Sanji heard, having, like the rest of them, come within a whisper of getting to Luffy on that fateful day. (And how’s that for awful symmetry?)

“It was only several decades later that I came across, quite by accident, a reference to ‘Roronoa Zoro’ in the present tense,” Robin says. “There was some suggestion that his body had been quite painstakingly preserved and stored in a high security facility. I could not find out anymore besides this at the time, but as we were just beginning to understand fully our newfound immortality, and realise that we had entered a new phase in which we needed to carve out ourselves in the absence of our captain, I felt there was nothing to be gained by opening old wounds.”

Robin pauses, but there’s only a slightly guilty silence from the rest of the crew over den den mushi. The crew had grieved for the desperate hole that Luffy had left in their lives (for a time it seemed as if the whole world had mourned for Luffy), but in general they had avoided thinking too hard about Zoro. His death had been somehow preventable in a way that Luffy’s hadn’t, and yet no one had tried to stop Zoro.

Oh, there were excellent reasons for that. Sanji’s been over them thousands of times – they were in shock; everything was chaos; it would have been suicide by Marine; could anyone really stop _Zoro_? But still. Sanji particularly feels the rotten lump of guilt because out of all of them he had always been the one most ready to piss Zoro off, challenge him, get up in his face and kick him around until he saw sense.

On that day, however, no one else mattered. No one could touch Zoro other than Luffy. And Luffy was dead. So Sanji can’t really blame Robin for putting Zoro in the past where he belonged – or was supposed to belong, anyway.

Usopp coughs awkwardly into the silence (Sanji rolls his eyes). “So, uh, are there any leads about who took it? I mean, if we can at least get it back now…”

There are general sounds of support from everyone else on the call. Giving him a proper resting place is the least they can do for their shattered swordsman.

“Unfortunately, Usopp,” Robin says, “I cannot find information that isn’t there.”

“Okay, I mean I understand there’s nothing as convenient as like, security cameras, but there must be some rumours? The black market? Someone in your, er, contacts, Robin?”

“You misunderstand me. No one stole that body. It walked out on its own.”

 

* * *

 

Robin goes on to explain that from the reports she was able to access, it was less of a break _in_ than a break _out_. The manner in which the museum had been breached and the security measures disabled strongly suggested a literal inside job.

Nami asks Robin if she really believes that Zoro’s body disabled the security systems, unlocked the door, and sallied forth on its own, zombie-like, out into the night. Robin admits it’s unlikely, but can see no other logical explanation. Chopper contends that the explanation is hardly ‘logical’. Usopp snappily reminds everybody they saw Zoro die, pretty unequivocally, and Franky has to intervene as Usopp’s voice gets higher and sharper.

In the end, the crew agree to reconvene at their annual meetup, which in any case is less than three days from now. Hopefully by then they will have some more concrete information, and can decide what to do from there.

 

* * *

 

Alright, so Zoro knows he’s not great with maps, okay? But when that weird megaphone guy said _go west_ from the main square, Zoro definitely did that. He got to the main square by following everyone else, and then, like the guy said, went left. Zoro had begun to suspect shenanigans after the third dead end, and just decided _fuck it_ and went his own way, so all told it’s several hours before he gets to the skeleton quarter.

After a bit more wandering, Zoro comes across a bar. And it’s definitely the right place. Apart from the black and white colour scheme, and an almost painfully ubiquitous skull motif, there’s also an enormous poster of Brook in his performance garb on the door. Zoro’s distantly relieved that his hunch was right, and he hasn’t weathered this bizarre and exhausting place for nothing. After all, where else would a skeleton hide, but among other skeletons?

The bar is ‘Home to The Skeleton Piano-Man’ the poster declares, ‘every night at 9pm’. The sun had set sometime after Zoro, lost, had stumbled into what he was pretty sure was the avian section (there were feathers _everywhere_ ). Between choking on down and finding someone to give him _reliable_ directions for once, Zoro had lost track of time, but the bar is lit up and there’s chatter coming from inside, so Zoro figures it can’t be that late. He pushes open the door, and walks inside.

It sounds like the start of a bad joke: ‘An undead swordsman, a talking skeleton, and the shattered remains of their sanity walk into a bar.’

_Ouch_.

The bar is packed, noisy and smoky, and the clientele are just as weird as Zoro’s come to expect from this planet. There’s a fair spread of animal and mechanical body adjustments – it looks like Brook is, as ever, popular across the board. Zoro’s pleased to see there’s an honest-to-god human bartender, though ‘human’ might be stretching it slightly. Zoro watches the bartender flick open a panel on his left pectoral and squirt what appears to be some sort of syrup into the drink he’s preparing. Zoro thinks of Franky, and winces.

Stepping forward into the bar, Zoro accidently jostles a table. He looks down to murmur an apology, but the words die on his lips. The patron whose beer had been sloshed glares at him, but all Zoro can see is the man’s right arm. From the shoulder to the elbow, it’s a normal arm, but the forearm and the hand are pure, white, bone. The flesh at the join goes from dry and mummified, to a sickening gangrene-grey, frayed at the edges to expose globular white fat and stringy puce-coloured muscle, finally knitting together to return to regular flesh just above the elbow.

Skeleton-arm sneers at Zoro, and waggles his bone fingers grotesquely in the swordsman’s general direction, spilt beer forgotten in favour of having fun at the tourist’s expense. Zoro shakes off his stupor, mutters an apology, and pushes off as quickly as he can through the crowd. Around him, though he tries not to notice, are patrons at varying stages of flesh decay. Several have arms stripped down to the bare bone, and some are wearing shorts and skirts in order to proudly display their femurs. A man to Zoro’s immediate left laughs with a clacking sound, his jawbone rattling alarmingly loosely, slapping against his still-fleshy upper mandible.

Reaching the bar, Zoro cants backwards to avoid a woman turning away with hands full of drinks. Involuntarily, his nostrils pinch as if expecting the whiff of decaying meat. Her _face_ is half _gone_ , the flesh looks like it’s melting away, skull bone underneath – eyeball one side, empty socket the other. Zoro forces his gaze away.

It’s not the bones that freak him out, Zoro decides. Brook is all bone, and Zoro’s never felt even the least repulsion around him. It’s the line between flesh and bone, flaunted and celebrated, that makes him want to back away. Stripping away living flesh to reveal dead bone underneath – it’s unnatural. But isn’t he the same? At least Brook is nothing _but_ white bone, dry and purified. But Zoro… Zoro is dead flesh flushed with new blood, a zombie forced back into consciousness, Thriller Bark all over again. He’s leaking loyalty and blood, uncalled for, breathing in a world without his captain. The skeleton adaptations in this bar reflect Zoro’s own death-over-life obscenity.

They’re also really fucking gross.

Zoro shakes off his repulsion.  The entire goddamn planet has been one distraction after another, and he’s damned if it’s going to turn him from his goal. He attempts to get the bartender’s attention. The man finishes serving his customer – who is nothing more terrifying than a man with cat ears – and turns to Zoro.

“Only bone-jobs have half-price drinks,” the bartender barks, apropos of nothing, and then fills three tankards of beer in quick succession and dumps them on the tray of a passing waitress.

“Okay,” Zoro says, nonplussed. “Look, I’d like a word with-,” Zoro almost says ‘Brook’, “-your piano-man.” The bartender looks unimpressed. “I’m an old friend,” Zoro adds, mostly accurately.

The bartender gives Zoro a look that suggests he gets a lot of people in here wanting a word with Brook. “The performance was twenty minutes ago. Come back tomorrow if you want to get his autograph,” he says, unhelpfully.

Zoro scowls, and is about to demonstrate how non-negotiable he feels about _wanting a word_ , when he’s forestalled by a commotion to his right. Drunken cheers and general clamouring erupt as Brook himself walks out a door that most probably leads to the bar’s back rooms. Seeing him, Zoro feels an almost painful rush of recognition, relief, and affection. Brook nods at a few people, and smiles, pats a few heads, shakes a few hands, and generally soaks up the inebriated affection of his fans as he wades over to bar. Brook stops at the counter, scant inches from Zoro in his black cloak and hood, to address the bartender.

“Mister Bartender!” Brook declares, voice reaching every edge of the room like a true performer. “I would like to buy a round for everyone here!”

General happiness bursts out among the patrons, and suddenly everyone is everyone else’s friend. Brook twinkles at the bartender – if he had eyelids he would be winking – and the bartender rolls his eyes.

“You’ve got a fan,” the bartender says, jerking a thumb in Zoro’s direction, before going about pulling beer after beer.

“Excellent!” exclaims Brook. “An autograph, my dear man? Let’s get you a drink!” Companionably, he lays a hand on Zoro’s shoulder,

and becomes very, very still. Deathly still, almost.

“Perhaps,” Brook says, carefully and slightly hysterically, “you should accompany me back to my changing rooms. I think I have some – uh – some photographs there, to sign. Yes, this way, this way.”

Brook propels Zoro to the side door, fans parting before Brook as he hastily acknowledges their accolades. “Thank you, thank you, come again tomorrow, please. Excuse me!”

 

* * *

 

A few minutes later, they stand in Brook’s dressing room, staring at each other. Slowly, Zoro removes the hood of his cloak.

 “Oh my bones!” Brooks gasps out, and unhesitatingly reaches towards Zoro, enveloping him, surprisingly carefully, in a hug.

Always slightly odd, being hugged by a skeleton. Zoro pats Brook’s back in a vaguely comforting way, feeling his spine beneath the fabric of his jacket.

Brook leans back, and his bony fingers grip the side of Zoro’s face, testing the flesh beneath them.

“You really are Zoro,” he says with tears in his voice. “How is this possible?”

Zoro takes a deep breath, and tries to explain, as best he can, how he woke up in a strange place and a strange time, and made his way through three different planets with more luck than anything else, to find Brook. It doesn’t take long, because Zoro doesn’t have Usopp’s flair for storytelling. When he’s finished, Brook grips Zoro’s biceps hard enough to bruise, mute with emotion.

“Yeah,” Zoro says roughly, through a throat that’s threatening to close up. “I’m okay,” he lies.

Brook shakes his head, afro bobbing gently. Then something appears to occur to him, and he darts over to the terminal in the corner of the room. His fingers dance over the keyboard lightly as he accesses the news sites.

“What’s that?” Zoro asks, as the image of his face fills the screen.

“It would appear you have made the news,” Brook says softly. “They think someone has stolen your body. Of course, it seems they do not suspect you are alive. How _are_ you alive?” Brook turns hollow eyes to Zoro’s own.

“I don’t know. I _shouldn’t be_ ,” Zoro says, with feeling.

“Yes, I know how that feels,” Brook says, his whole face shifting somehow to convey a deep and sincere sympathy.

Zoro tries to speak past the vacuum in his lungs. “We did it to you again, Brook. Left you alone, in a world without your crew.”

Brook shifts to surprised, and then rapidly waves his arms in denial.

“My apologies, Zoro! I should have told you first, but, you see, nobody died,” Brook says. “Except, of course, you and the captain. And apparently not even you.”

“The rest of the crew is… alive?” Zoro asks uncomprehendingly.

Brook guides Zoro to a chair and gently pushes him into it, before taking the seat opposite. Brook then tries to explain the whole bizarre situation.

“After Luffy was executed and you,” here Brook’s body language goes strange and his tone becomes very careful, “took out the remaining enemies-”

(Look, Zoro will admit, he’s hazy on what exactly happened, since he was just a little bit battle-clouded, but he can’t image watching him die was any worse than watching Luffy die. He certainly can’t imagine it was _unexpected_.)

“-after that, well, things were a bit of a mess. Marine reinforcements showed up, but so did many of our allies. I must admit, to my swordsman’s shame, that we did not participate very much in that battle. As you might imagine – oh, well, you were there, weren’t you? – things were very confused. It was chaotic, I think we were all in shock. Do you know, I cannot even remember who it was that gave us passage out of there, and who it was we have to thank for watching our backs?”

Brook takes a deep breath, and stills his trembling bones. He then tells Zoro that many of the allies and friends that Luffy had made did their duty by the Straw Hat crew. Made lost, or sad, or angry by grief, and vulnerable, Zoro’s nakama were well protected in those first awful days.

“And then,” Brook says, steel entering his voice, “we took our revenge.”

Zoro listens, hollowed, while Brook describes the extent of the Straw Hats’ vengeance. The Revolutionary Army had wanted reform, and the Straw Hats had given it to them, stripping the World Government of first its might – destroying the positions (and sometimes the lives) of many corrupt marines – and then its authority.

Zoro looks at Brook, then at the terminal that still shows his face, then at his hands, and then back up at Brook. Brook almost winces, because Zoro’s eyes are merciless.

“For all that,” Zoro says, hoarse, “it doesn’t seem like much has changed.”

“You have to understand, that for us it wasn’t about revolution, but revenge.” Brook makes a helpless gesture. “Eventually we ran out of targets. We were exhausted, and the grief was eating at us, and we had to stop. You must understand, that we _did_ take payment for Luffy’s life. But Luffy himself would not think that this-”

Brook stops, lump in his throat. The expression on Zoro’s face is vaguely terrifying.

“Luffy’s dead,” Zoro says ruthlessly.

“Yes,” Brook forces himself to admit. “He is. But so is anyone who had a hand in his death. You yourself had a role in that.”

Zoro doesn’t react to the faint remonstration. He stares at the ground at Brook’s feet. Brook sighs, and continues his explanation. He tells Zoro how the crew kept themselves together as much as they could, keeping a low profile but still trying to carry the spirit of Luffy’s brand of piratical freedom. The World Government and the Marines built themselves up again, this time as an integrated organisation, because as you cut off one head of the hydra two more grow in its place.

“I’m not wrong about the timing, though?” Zoro interrupts Brook. “How the hell is everybody still alive?”

“Actually, that is still mostly a mystery,” Brook says. “It took us a long time to realise that we were not aging like we ought to – at least, the rest of the crew wasn’t. I, of course, am already an ancient skeleton, yoho-hugh.” Brook sheepishly turns his laugh into a cough at Zoro’s stony expression.

More soberly, Brook tells Zoro that the best they’d been able to find out is that there is someone in the World Government’s employ, possibly related to the Celestial Dragons, that has a devil fruit that can extend life. Through the years, it had become apparent that many of Admirals and government officials, those that replaced the ones the Straw Hats had defeated, were using this devil fruit to their advantage, never aging, never retiring.

And for some reason, the person with that devil fruit had been present at Luffy’s execution, and for some reason, the entire Straw Hat crew had been hit with that person’s abilities. Why this had happened nobody had been able to say for sure, but it was pretty clear that the government wouldn’t want immortal pirates – and certainly not the Pirate King’s crew – running about the place causing trouble. For the past several decades Zoro’s nakama had lain low, helping others where they could, sometimes drifting apart to pursue different goals, but always coming together on the anniversary of their captain’s death.

“And yours too, Zoro. We mourned you and him, together.”

Zoro tries to absorb this new information. His nakama, apparently unchanged – at least in appearance – have breathed every day for almost a century after their captain’s death. Zoro was hardly rejoicing in his resurrection before, but he is suddenly viciously bitter that he, too, must suffer this fate.

“Actually,” Brook muses, oblivious to Zoro’s inner turmoil, “the anniversary is in less than three days. Oh! I must tell the others you’re alive!”

Brook flails about for his den den mushi, muttering _I cannot believe I only just thought of that_ and _What is wrong with me_ , before locating the small white snail-like creature.

On the one hand, Zoro is not as bereft as he had thought. His nakama are _alive_ , though for some reason this fact is having trouble getting through. His emotions need to do a one-eighty, come back from soul-crushing grief, back to a world where Zoro actually has nakama, where Zoro has more friends than the swords at his side (which are still, by the way, missing).

On the other hand, Zoro’s been robbed of his righteous vengeance. Oh yes, the crew deserved their fair share of blood. But it’s not enough, for _him_ , to be told it happened decades ago, to be told it was awful and tragic and secretly satisfying, and that Zoro slept through it all. He still craves it, because his heart tells him that it was only a few short days ago that they took away his captain.

Maybe he’ll feel different when he sees them, his crew. Brook alone is helping. Zoro watches as the musician shakes his den den mushi in frustration until the poor thing droops in dizziness. It’s like dipping into madness and self-loathing, only to look up and see a loved one smile at you. The jerk of perspective is emotional vertigo, and Zoro has yet to find firm ground.

He’s _trying_.

“It seems like everyone’s engaged,” Brook huffs in frustration. “If we have time I’ll try again later. But,” Brook claps his hands, mood rapidly shifting to his customary cheerfulness, “imagine the look on their faces when they see you at the meetup! Oh, I could write a song!”

Zoro doesn’t share Brook’s enthusiasm. He feels wrung out, and so tired. He watches as Brook dances a few steps to some inner music only he can hear, before whirling about to face Zoro.

“There is so much to do! Come, let us go to my apartment, it’s just above the bar.”

 

* * *

 

Brook shows Zoro into a cosy three room apartment, where the interior decoration definitely runs to Brook’s gaudy taste, but which nevertheless manages to be cheerful and homey.

“If we’re to make the meetup we need to leave the day after tomorrow,” Brook says while Zoro pokes around the living room. “I need to run some errands. In the meantime – perhaps a bath, yes?” Brook grins at Zoro, not that his face can do much else. “For relaxation?”

Zoro squints at Brook, because a skeleton without olfactory equipment oughtn’t be telling him he smells. Then Brooks head tilts in a way that tells Zoro he’s looking at Zoro’s unnaturally brown hair – flaking dried blood like rusty dandruff – and yeah, okay, Zoro can understand why that might be disconcerting.

After his bath – which _was_ relaxing, as long as Zoro didn’t close his eyes for too long or accidently brush against the starburst scar over his heart – Brook’s back, and waiting for Zoro with a change of clothes and some news about how he knows a guy. Zoro pulls on the black pants, which need to be rolled up, but eyes the green paisley shirt – the same colour, now, as his hair – with reserve.

“I have others,” Brook says cheerfully, in a tone that suggests _others_ are even more flamboyant. “Something with ruffles, perhaps?”

“It’s fine, thanks,” Zoro says gruffly as he hurriedly pulls on the shirt. The cuffs also need to be rolled up, but otherwise it fits decently, which says nasty things about Zoro’s muscle mass.

The guy that Brook knows is going to set Zoro up with some forged papers, enough that any automated system should bypass him without sending up red flags. The news blackout immediately after Zoro woke up, and his erratic movements as he tried to find Brook, both worked in Zoro’s favour as far as covering his tracks, but now the official word is out they’re going to have to be a lot more careful.

Zoro spends the night, and all the next day, in the quiet haven of Brook’s apartment, trying not to think about Luffy, about having to live out dozens of days with nakama a century older than him and no captain.

He tries to sleep. The dreams in which he dies over and over again are actually the better ones.

 

* * *

 

“Ready, Zoro?” Brook asks a day later, as he and Zoro are about to board what is possibly the world’s most boring-looking spacecraft. Brook had booked them two seats under false names on an economy-line passenger ship, owned by a company whose approach to earning money is to crowd as many cheap seats on to one ship as possible. Zoro is not looking forward to their twenty hour flight.

Brook, meanwhile, looks excited. Probably. It’s hard for Zoro to tell under the costume that is Brook’s travelling outfit. In order to hide the extent of his skeleton nature, Brook is wearing a long coat, gloves to hide his bony fingers, a surgical mask to cover his rictus grin and make pretend like he’s worried about spreading germs, and sunglasses as opaque as his actual eye sockets. Nobody going to look twice at a hooded Zoro, not with this nine-foot man of mystery beside him.

Zoro nods grimly, and Brook grips his shoulder in solidarity. They board the ship.

 

* * *

 

Twenty hours later, Zoro steps off the ship feeling flat and claustrophobic. His hair is limp against his head and his skin feels lukewarm and clammy. He needs a shower and a fourteen hour nap and if this is the standard for the ships of the future Zoro is deeply unimpressed. Brook seems none the worse for wear, his afro as unscathed as ever, clothes barely rumpled.

“This way, Zoro.” Brook tugs on Zoro’s arm and leads him to a taxi rank filled with several bubble-shaped cars that look like they’ve seen better days.

The ten minute ride is conducted in silence. Brook peers out the window every so often, and after a short while taps the driver on the shoulder. The taxi pulls up to the curb, and Brook waves some sort of money card in the general direction of the driver while Zoro steps out into heavy, humid air.

Brook has stopped them in front of a non-descript restaurant. Zoro squints up at the sign. It says, in proud if faded lettering, _Baratie II_.

Zoro takes a deep breath, and thick, warm air fills his lungs. In, he breathes tense anticipation.

“Rather muggy isn’t it?” Brook observes, now standing beside Zoro as the taxi putters off into the distance. “Even though I don’t have skin to feel it,” he adds, mostly out of obligation. Zoro exhales softly in reply, and moves through the soupy air towards the door.

Brook is quicker, and darts ahead of him. The skeleton makes a vaguely apologetic gesture as he lays a gloved hand on the door handle, but Zoro gets it. There’s a century he doesn’t have with the people behind the door, and for a fleeting moment he almost regrets not trying to hold onto that.

Almost.

 

* * *

  

Sanji surveys his nakama as they engage in a fantastically crafted but rather sedate meal. Crew meals are always quiet these days, when they do manage to get together little more than once a year, but it’s important to stay in touch.

Sanji’s restaurant is closed for the day, and the only sounds are the chink of cutlery on plates and the soft chatter as everyone catches up on the news of each other’s lives over the past year. The main issue of the past few days has been temporarily shelved until after the meal, out of respect for Sanji’s cooking.

The welcoming jingle of the Baratie’s shop bell causes Sanji to look up from fetching more rice. His face floods with a grin as Brook steps through – Sanji hadn’t been sure their musician would be able to make it given that Brook hadn’t answered his den den mushi.

Usopp, likewise attracted by the bell, turns around in his seat and begins with a joyful, “Brook!-”

But the rest of Usopp’s greeting freezes in his throat. Sanji’s smile turns rictus. Everyone else turns to see what the problem is.

The problem is that a corpse just walked through the door, and it isn’t Brook.

“Zoro…?” Nami hears herself say, disbelievingly.

Nobody had really given much credit to Robin’s zombie theory, and yet here was their dead swordsman, standing in front of them.

Everyone stares at Zoro wordlessly, and he inspects them right back, each member in turn.

“Yohoho,” Brook says nervously in the silence. “I would have called ahead, but, because of security…” Beyond the special white den den mushis Nami had managed to procure for each of the crew, using any other form of communication to contact the others was too much of a risk, and this included making calls while travelling.

Brook’s voice breaks through the shock. A chair scrapes back, quick hoofbeats tap across the floor, and the small furry object that is the best doctor in the world launches himself at the prodigal swordsman.

Zoro catches Chopper easily, and lays a soothing hand on the back of the trembling reindeer.  

And suddenly everyone is crowding around Zoro, mostly to check if he really is flesh and blood before them. Sanji grips Zoro’s shoulder painfully hard, Nami hugs him, Robin’s hands blossom out and check his pulse at his wrist and his neck – morbid woman – Usopp dives in and almost removes Zoro’s remaining eye with his nose, and Franky bear hugs them all.

(Brook laughs delightedly, and Franky objects that _he’s not crying, you’re crying._ )

Zoro’s heart feels too full. He’s happy they’re here, they’re alive, they’re back together, but he can’t take it and everyone is here _but_ , and his heart keeps swelling, inverting like a black hole, expanding past his chest cavity, filling up his lungs, blocking his airways, he _can’t breathe_ -

Brook ushers a space around him, and guides Zoro to a chair at the table. Zoro feels distantly grateful, and doesn’t notice his nakama exchanging concerned looks over his head.

The smell of Sanji’s cooking from the half-eaten meal is fucking fantastic. Everything else is different, aged a hundred years in a week, but somehow Sanji’s coconut prawns still smell the same as they did on the Going Merry, on the Thousand Sunny. Zoro sniffs appreciatively, and his stomach chooses this moment to let the Universe know that Zoro hasn’t felt much like eating for the past seven or so days.

Sanji scowls, deeply offended, and in three seconds has a plate piled high with rice and prawns and shrimp and other good things set squarely in front of Zoro, who sets to work with the grim determination of someone who is hungry _now_ but will probably be nauseous in five minutes.

The rest of the crew settle back into their places around the table, an aura of disbelief and happiness on them.

“Zoro- how? You’re- What _happened_?” Nami asks in wonderment.

Zoro is too busy shovelling food into his body to respond, so Brook speaks up and tells Zoro’s story – from waking up in a museum to showing up at Brook’s bar – as best he can. When he’s finished the crew’s expressions range from thoughtful to open-mouthed.

“We should have known about this,” Sanji mutters into cupped hands as he lights a cigarette.

“It seems so impossible,” Usopp says. “I mean, how? Zoro, you were, uh, I mean, how do you think you woke up?”

Zoro swallows his last mouthful of rice and sets his fork carefully down next to his plate. Sanji’s expecting him to go for seconds. He doesn’t.

“Dunno,” Zoro says in response to Usopp’s question. “Brook said the reason you guys are alive is because of some devil fruit. Maybe I’m here because of the same thing.”

“That’s an idea,” Nami muses. “But we thought the fruit could only extend life, right? It isn’t something that can bring someone… back.”

“Yoho, I have a theory about that,” Brook says. “In all the confusion on That Day, it may have been that our perception that Zoro was… irretrievable, was mistaken. After all, none of us could get close to him. Perhaps it was the case that Zoro was only gravely, not fatally, injured.”

There’s a murmur of shock and realisation from the rest of the crew. Robin pulls out a small device that Zoro had seen a few people using, a cross between a book and a terminal, and her fingers rapidly tap out something onto the flat screen.

“If he was put into stasis quickly enough, it may be that he has simply been… asleep, these past years,” Robin says.

Zoro thinks, _no_.

“Of course!” Chopper puts in. “That would explain why it took so long for him to wake up – he was slowly healing all this time!’

Zoro thinks, _I was dead_.

“And just in time for the centennial reunion of the Straw Hat crew,” Sanji remarks dryly.

Zoro thinks, _someone brought me back_.

Zoro _says_ , “Who?”

Robin hums thoughtfully, and leans over to show the screen of her device to Nami, sitting next to her.

“I’ve been trying to trace the signal responsible for disabling the museum’s security. They’ve hidden their tracks well, but if we coordinate with the precise timing of Zoro’s re-awakening, and the fact that his presence hasn’t been picked up yet…“ Robin says.

“Someone’s been watching out for him! It _must_ be the same person who woke him up, our mysterious devil fruit user,” Nami says. “That means if we triangulate the signals…”

Robin nods, and lets an eager Nami take the device out of her hands.

“Let me see, if we overlay the signal map for, say, Amplio, on the street map,” Nami mutters, “and we track that through, hang on, Robin-”

One of Robin’s hands blooms out of Nami’s shoulder and presses a few buttons on the screen.

“Oh, yes. The third quadrant, hmm.”

Together, Nami and Robin bend over the small screen, putting together the information they have gathered about the mysterious devil fruit user with Zoro’s movements over the past few days. Both Franky and Brook cluster around to peer over the women’s shoulders, Usopp bobbing behind them trying to see what’s going on. Chopper gets up on the table to see the screen, and Sanji puffs a circle around the table, in wiggly pride over how clever his female crewmates are.

Zoro sits apart. _I was dead_ , he thinks. He’s crossed the line between life and death more times than he should have, and he knows what it feels like. In that high-walled place, among the blood-eddied mud and below the lifeless body of his captain, Zoro had _definitely_ died.

_They kept my body_ , Zoro thinks, _and now I’m here_. He feels like his nakama are missing the most important part of this whole situation.

“Ah hah!” Nami exclaims, jerking upright and almost braining herself on Franky’s chin. She waves Robin’s device in the air triumphantly.

“You know where the devil fruit user is?!” Usopp asks excitedly.

“Well, no, not _exactly_ ,” Nami says. “But we now know what sector they’re in – it’s only a matter of nine or ten planets.”

“Oh, _only_ ,” Usopp says sarcastically.

Sanji whacks him on the back of the head. “It’s more than we knew before, dumbass. It’s better than the whole goddamn Universe.”

Usopp clutches his head dramatically as Brook cackles in the background. Franky clangs his arms together, making as much noise as a brass band, and booms something about _adventure_ and _exploration_. Robin laughs behind her hand, and Nami rolls her eyes, and Sanji starts briskly clearing the table, in _preparation_.

“Do we need to?” Chopper asks quietly, his voice breaking into the general excitement of the room. Everyone turns to look at him, where he’s still standing on the table.

“Do we need to find the devil fruit user?” Chopper asks again. “We’re alive, aren’t we? Do we really need to know _why_ or _how_?”

“Well-” someone tries.

“It’ll be dangerous,” Chopper interrupts. “I’m not scared, but,” he looks down at his hooves. “We’ve just, somehow, fantastically, gotten Zoro _back_. I don’t want to risk losing anyone again.”

There’s a few moments of silence because yes, it will be dangerous, and no, no one else wants to lose anyone again.

It’s Robin who speaks up.

“I do think it is necessary. In order to protect ourselves in the long term, we must have as much information as possible. We do not know how our extended lives work, or how long we have. More importantly, we do not know the motivation of the devil fruit user. If they are our enemy, we must be able to prepare against that.”

Chopper looks helplessly toward Zoro, torn. Zoro has picked up Robin’s device, and is staring at the map on the screen like it means something to him.

“Lil’ bro,” Franky says to Chopper. “Who do you see here?”

“Uh,” Chopper says, thrown by the question. “The crew?”

“Yeah,” Franky nods encouragingly. “The crew. We’re the Straw Hats. _Zoro’s nakama_.”

Chopper’s mouth makes an ‘O’ of understanding.

“We’ll protect him,” Franky says determinedly, thumping his fist against his chest and making a reassuringly solid _whump_ sound.

“Okay,” Nami says softly. And then, with more conviction, “Okay. So we’re agreed. How about we take some time to wrap things up, get some supplies and then we meet back here in a couple of days?”

The rest of the crew murmur agreement or nod.

“And then Zoro can stay with Sanji in the meanwhile-”

“Where are my swords?” Zoro says abruptly, apparently having ignored the past five minutes of conversation.

As a one, the crew turn towards Robin. She smiles her small, pleased smile – that the crew looks to her for information and guidance will always make her feel the warm glow of their regard and trust.

“They are, as far as I know, in the possession of Captain Tashigi,” Robin says.

There’s a beat as the crew try and place the name. Zoro’s face spasms into one-part embarrassment and one-part anguish, before becoming smoothed over.

“Oh!” Nami says in realisation. “Smoker’s right hand ma- woman.”

“She’s still alive? Of course, she must have been there on that day…” Usopp asks and answers his own question.

“You know where she is,” Zoro says to Robin, more of a statement than a question.

“Yes, but-”

“That’s where we’re headed,” Zoro declares, standing up.

“Oi, oi, since when do you get to decide that?” Sanji asks irritably. First mate or no, that’s never how the Straw Hats have worked.

“That’s where _I’m_ headed,” Zoro amends, coldly. He’s glad his nakama are safe – deeply, thank-fuck relieved more like – but if they’re stuck too far in the future then Zoro will just go ahead without them. He doesn’t have much of a plan, but he’s going to set this clusterfuck of a world to right one way or another. It doesn’t require much – all he needs is a ship, his swords, and his captain.

His captain’s memory. Revenge – vengeance – his dead captain.

Luffy. He just needs Luffy.

Zoro starts heading for the door, because life is simple if you pick a path and stick to it, damned what reason says. Franky steps in front of him, putting his large hands up partly to placate Zoro and partly to stop him from leaving.

“Of course we’ll help get your swords back,” Franky says, glaring at Sanji over Zoro’s shoulder. “I brought the Thousand Sunny – she’s docked not far. She felt she would be needed,” Franky adds softly.

“That’s not what my problem is,” Sanji mutters, but doesn’t say anymore as Robin lays a stilling hand on his shoulder and spreads two more in front of her in a peacemaking gesture.

“We can decide on the best course of action on the way there. Fortunately, Captain Tashigi is stationed in the sector very near to where we’ve traced Zoro’s mysterious benefactor,” Robin says.

“That’s… convenient,” Usopp says with mild suspicion.

“And of course,” Robin continues, “Zoro’s swords are an important connection for him to our previous life,” which makes a lot of sense to the rest of the crew but none at all to Zoro.

They’re still the Straw Hat crew, aren’t they? Zoro is still their swordsman, and Luffy is still their captain. Zoro can bring that back. He _can_.


	3. Chapter 3

The two days Zoro stays in Sanji’s spare bedroom are hideously tense.

Zoro knows something’s wrong. He doesn’t fit with Sanji, with the crew, and it feels _wrong_. But there’s a bigger reason why it feels wrong, and nothing’s going to change until Zoro fixes that, so he doesn’t have _time_ for all this.

Sanji deals with it by running errands all day and avoiding Zoro all night. He doesn’t want to confront it, doesn’t want to see reflected in Zoro his own buried pain. Sanji also suspects that if he’s left alone with Zoro for more than ten minutes things are rapidly going to dissolve into a screaming match and then physical blows.

You see, Sanji blames Zoro for what happened, but who he really blames, is Luffy.

But Luffy’s _dead_.

Sanji stops hating Zoro and their dead captain long enough to understand that after Luffy’s death, the rest of the crew had had each other. They had their families, and friends, and allies – they had a world they were familiar with, and one in which they were powerful. In taking the easy way out, Zoro had given all that up, and so he had paid for it. Zoro had had to ride the first week of grief out by himself in a completely alien world. It’s not enough for Sanji to forgive Zoro, not quite yet, but it’s enough to stop him from starting something with kicks and vitriol.

_Give it time_ , Sanji tells himself, ignoring the fact that three hundred and sixty-five thousand days hasn’t yet been enough time for his own self.

 

* * *

 

“Sunny!” Chopper’s gleeful cry rings out as he rushes forward and flattens himself on the ship’s hull, attempting to hug the Thousand Sunny. It’s been a fair few years since Franky brought the ship to one of the meets, as they’re all afraid she might be recognised and harmed.

The rest of the crew flow on board, reacquainting themselves with what all of them will always think of as _home_. Franky raps his knuckles on Sunny’s hull – adam wood now laced with microfibres of iron and steel;  Sunny is _strong_ – and beams at Chopper.

“She’s pleased to see you!” Franky informs the doctor.

“Is she?” Chopper asks, breathless with the wonderment that he’s somehow never managed to lose, and for which the rest of the crew cherishes him. “What else does she say?”

“She says she’s so happy to be sailing together again, and she can’t wait to go on new adventures with us all.”

Chopper laughs and claps his hooves in delight. The doctor wiggles a little, then runs up the ramp to pass the message on to Usopp, who’s busy cooing at his genetically modified Pop Green plants.

Franky’s encouraging smile fades as Chopper moves out of sight, and his coif droops over one eye. The cyborg pats Sunny’s side again, this time more despondently. The ship _is_ pleased to have her nakama on board again. Even though she misses her captain – what is a pirate ship without a captain? – she has a navigator to guide her and a shipwright to fix her, and nakama to fill her cabins with laughter and noise. But…

But Franky looks up to where Zoro is standing in the middle of the deck, arms crossed and scowling, and looking so _lost_ that both Franky’s digital and analog hearts ache. A man should never be lost on his own ship.

Franky lies both hands, palms down, on Sunny, and rests his forehead against her sturdy wood. _It’ll just take time_ , he tells her. _Zoro’s a bit lost right now but we’ll help him find his way back_ , he promises.

And then Franky apologises to Sunny, because he can see a lot of pain in the future for all of them.

 

* * *

 

It feels really weird, sailing as a crew, all together again.

By far the weirdest part of it all, however, is Zoro.

Nami remembers, when she allows herself to, a Zoro that was strong and reliable and often stupid. Whose constant unwavering support was the bedrock of the crew, and who was always just _there_ , solid, the immovable object to Luffy’s unstoppable force.

_This_ Zoro, however, seems almost fragile. And it’s such a bizarre adjective to associate with _Roronoa Zoro_ that Nami’s not surprised everyone is having trouble adjusting.

That may be an understatement.

It takes almost four days to reach the moon on which Captain Tashigi is stationed. Zoro’s late to the first three meals because he got lost on a ship that’s been his home for the last decade (in Zoro-time, at least).

Chopper tries to help out by giving Zoro the guided tour, which only serves to confuse the swordsman more. Nami feels that pointing out everything that has _changed_ is probably not the best tactic.

Usopp, working on the old adage that you only fear what you don’t understand, tries to explain the new technology to Zoro. He tells Zoro how the ship traps breathable air and adjusts to the pressure of leaving and entering the atmosphere, how the sails are gaussian fields catching stellar winds, and how the ship’s power is drawn from ionised gas in the interstellar medium. Zoro listens with glazed eyes, absorbing nothing, and Nami remembers that, like Luffy, Zoro had never really cared _how_ things worked, only that they did.

Brook and Robin hold whispered conversations about _grief_ and _processing_ and _support_ , which does nothing but make Zoro’s shoulders tense.

Sanji is absolutely no help, because even Nami’s meaningful looks aren’t enough for the cook to move past the anger he’s been carrying around for a century. Nami thinks that, secretly, Sanji wishes he had gone the same way as Zoro, fighting for their captain’s soul. But Sanji had stayed, the only remaining member of the Monster Trio, because the rest of the crew needed his strength.

It wasn’t untrue, and Nami hates that.

Franky’s the only one that actually _helps_ , because he keeps Zoro busy. Moving soundlessly and majestically through the infinite sea of space, Sunny bears the brunt of the harsh conditions. She needs constant repair and maintenance, and Zoro takes to the task with a single-mindedness that reminds Nami, unhappily, of what _she_ was like in the days after Luffy’s execution.

It’s not a permanent solution, but for now, when Zoro’s legs are tired and his arms ache and his hands cramp and his head rings from the hammering blows – when he’s this worn out, his eyes don’t get caught, and linger, on the figurehead.

The rest of the time, Zoro acts like zombie he’s not supposed to be. He stops in the middle of whatever he’s doing to stare at nothing, for minutes on end. He tenses every time someone accidently touches him. Sometimes he responds to questions normally, and other time he snaps or snarls or storms away. He trains all night, eyes burning into the darkness, and works doggedly during the day.

_Maybe it was a good thing Zoro died back then_ , thinks Nami, and immediately hates herself for it.

Four days later, Sanji’s joined Zoro and Robin in insomnia, Chopper is hyper-sensitive, Usopp’s on edge, Brook’s optimism is being pushed to the limit, and Franky’s giving new definition to swearing like a sailor. Nami’s set to scream, yell, vent, _something_ , _anything_ , to break the tension.

Then, finally, thank god:

“Land, ho!”

 

* * *

 

“What are we waiting for?” Zoro asks impatiently.

The Sunny is gravity anchored just inside the orbit of the moon that is their destination, swinging around lazily in the low gravitational pull. Franky doesn’t look inclined to bring the ship in any closer to land.

“We need to plan, shithead." Sanji’s voice drips irritability. "We can’t just walk up, all polite, knock on the door, ‘Excuse me, Mr Marine, we’re the Straw Hat pirates, we’d like a word’.”

“We don’t ask _politely_.”

“There could be a whole garrison there!” Sanji rounds on Zoro, suddenly furious. “What the fuck do you think you’re going to do, rush in like an idiot, no idea what you’re up against, and we’re going to have to drag you out broken and bleeding?! What am I talking about, of course that’s what you’re going to do, it’s all you’re _fucking_ _GOOD FOR_!”

“ _Sanji!_ ” Chopper admonishes.

Sanji scowls and fumbles in his breast pocket for a cigarette, but all he finds is an empty packet. He shreds the carton in frustration, little bits of cardboard fluttering to the floor. Zoro watches him stonily.

“It looks like there’s only a skeleton crew,” Robin says calmly as she consults one of the Sunny’s monitors.

(Brook looks around hopefully to see if anyone else caught the pun, but senses this is perhaps not the time for jocularity.)

“The heat signatures are mostly concentrated around a small villa in the North,” Robin continues.

“A villa?” Usopp asks.

“Yes, a small old world style house. The layout is typically that of a horseshoe shape around a small internal courtyard, or peristylium-”

“Er, yes, thank you Robin,” Usopp interrupts hastily. “I meant, is that it? A few marines and a villa? Are we sure this isn’t like, Tashigi’s holiday home or something?”

“No,” Robin says. “This is the location of her official marine posting, though in practice she has also been in residence at the villa for approximately two decades now.”

Nami wrinkles her nose. “Seems suspicious.”

“Not overly. It is what is referred to as a babysitting job. Captain Tashigi is guarding someone – a diplomat’s child, perhaps, or a political prisoner. Given more time I’m sure I could find out the identity of her charge.”

“Probably not necessary,” Nami says. “We’re only here for the swords. You’re sure it’s not a trap, Robin?”

“Captain Tashigi is a good marine, but not popular with her superiors. There is a reason she hasn’t been promoted in over a century.”

“Because she got hit with the same immortality stuff we did, you mean?” Chopper says.

“Yes, and also because she was Smoker’s subordinate, and Smoker was rumoured to be fond of us,” Robin says, smiling faintly.

Sanji lets loose a disbelieving snort. The few times he’d met Smoker Sanji had got the distinct impression the marine would have been more than happy to lock them all up and throw away the key. It probably had more to with the fact that, like Smoker, Tashigi was one of the few good ones, who understood that justice sometimes meant letting the _pirate_ save the kingdom and rescue the princess.

Nami clears her throat. “Okay, so, I guess we just go and knock on the door?”

 

* * *

 

It’s pathetically easy. There’s a grand total of five marines in various stages of inalertness. Usopp takes out two with tranquiliser pellets, Robin sleep chokes another two with her devil fruit powers, and a sharp whack to the head with Nami’s staff quickly renders the final one unconscious.

They move quickly, mostly to stop Zoro and Sanji from joining in – Sanji because he’s clearly in a mood to use excessive force, and Zoro because… well, because no one’s really sure _what_ Zoro’s going to do.

 

* * *

 

It will ever be poor Tashigi’s fate to be caught unawares by the Straw Hat crew. She’s on her way to the kitchen when the front door bursts open, and there they stand.

Tashigi starts and drops her coffee cup (‘World’s Best Boss’), but manages not to scream.

“Captain Tashigi,” Robin greets cordially. “I hope our presence here isn’t _too_ much of a surprise.”

Tashigi’s throat works as she tries to gain some poise. “Yes,” she stutters, “I mean, no, we-” The marine captain takes a deep breath and pushes her glasses up her nose.

“Vice-Admiral Smoker and I have always suspected you were still at large,” she says, her manner distinctly unfriendly. “Since we were all subject to the same devil fruit on the day your Captain died.”

At these last few words, Zoro’s body language changes from bored to dangerous. Tashigi’s eyes flicker to the new threat, and then her mouth drops open in shock and recognition.

“But _you_ … You’re- you’re dead,” she stammers, now entirely wrong-footed.

“Where are my swords?” Zoro demands, not interested in justifying his resurrection.

Tashigi’s eyes become guarded, and she draws herself together again, trying to recover. “I’m sure I don’t know what-”

“You have a very thorough database,” Robin interrupts smoothly. “It’s a pity it doesn’t have better security.”

Tashigi glares at her.

“We only want one thing – well, three things – and then we’ll be gone,” Nami says.

“Fine,” Tashigi forces out. She’s furious, but knows the Straw Hats have a strong advantage. “You get the swords, and then you leave. This way.”

“Wait!” Nami stops her. The navigator strides over to Tashigi and performs a very brusque and thorough pat-down.

“No weapons,” Nami says with some surprise.

“Gone soft,” Brook clicks his teeth in mock disapproval.

Tashigi glowers at them all, but she’s outnumbered and definitely outgunned. She makes a stiff about-face and leads the way through the atrium, through the interior courtyard-

(“The pestilence? Perineum? Pesto?”

“The peristylium, Usopp.”)

-and into a small room at the back of the villa. The Straw Hats trail after her, admiring the scenery, and Nami makes pointed comments about how expensive this all must be. Tashigi very deliberately ignores them all, and enters something complicated into a number pad on the wall. A portion of the floor slides back, and reveals a staircase leading down.

“I’ll stay here. It could be a trap, and _someone_ needs to be responsible,” Sanji says, glaring at the back of Zoro’s head as it disappears underground. Tashigi had not stopped to see if they were following her, and Zoro was currently as single-minded as a hacksaw.

“Me too,” Franky says. “I’m too big to fit down there anyway. Yell if she tries anything.”

“Thanks, Sanji, Franky,” Nami says, as she hurries down after her nakama, and into the basement.

Down the stairs, and suddenly Nami is in a spacious and well-lit room, furnished with a large number of display cases. Dozens of swords of all shapes and sizes populate the displays, and are hung on racks on the wall.

Brook, stooping to avoid bashing his skull on the ceiling, is inspecting one of the wall-racks and making appreciative noises. Robin is alternating between making notes on her data-pad and peering with a keen historian’s interest at some of the older specimens. Chopper and Usopp are open-mouthed, gazing at the sheer scale of the collection.

Tashigi stands in the middle of the room, clenching and unclenching her fists, unwilling for _pirates_ and _thieves_ to be anywhere near her precious collection, but having no say in the matter.

It was like this:

In the confusion, _back then_ , no one had noticed Tashigi commandeer Roronoa’s three swords. She had tried to tell herself that she was rescuing them from a life of misuse at the hands of a pirate, and that they would now be preserved and used for _true_ justice, but in the end these words felt like lies even to her own ears. What Roronoa had done–, seeing his actions upon the death of his captain–, well, it had badly shaken Tashigi. Smoker had seemed convinced of the Straw Hats’ basic goodness, and she was inclined to respect her superior’s opinion, and actually secretly agreed herself– in any case, it was clear that Roronoa’s and her own philosophy on swords disagreed, even if she could respect the man she still felt that the swords now, in her hands, would – _should_ – get to experience a different spirit. There was, too, a secret element of proprietary feeling – not quite greed – she didn’t covet the swords, not really – but as a collector, it was satisfying to hold such history in her hands, place them among the rest of her hoard.

Except she found out later that she may have underestimated the synergy Roronoa had with his weapons. Once the man himself was dead – well, it was as if his soul had also been among his weapons, and now that was gone the swords, too, were just inert matter. Tashigi could wield the swords, use them to perform the same katas as she did with any other blade, but the swords didn’t respond. Actually, it was a bit worse than that – they passively rejected her. The red sword, the cursed sword, did not cut her (please, she had more skill than that) but it did become heavy in her hand, like a toddler who doesn’t want to be carried and just lets its weight sag under gravity. Shūsui was simply cold to her, feeling like nothing more than a kitchen knife when she tried to wield it. The white sword was the worst – it was blunt no matter how often she sharpened it, and during sparring would first become heavy like a greatsword, then boomerang into the lightest of foils. In the end, all Tashigi could do was keep them rust-free and safe, hung among the most prized of her collection but otherwise useless.

When Zoro walks into her weapons room, among which Tashigi counts many famous and infamous swords spanning hundreds of years of creation and use (including, and she was very proud of this, Mihawk’s black sword and its matching dagger), his gaze does not wander. He doesn’t linger among the wall racks, or the glass cases, but zeroes in instinctively and inevitably onto _his_ three swords. Tashigi, even though she had meticulously catalogued her collection according to her own finely-tuned taxonomy, could never find herself able to break up the set. By rights, Kitetsu had a place among the other cursed swords (the case was warded, just in case, because Tashigi’s grandmother had been a wise woman and Tashigi was always one to respect her elders). But even though almost a century had passed, Tashigi had never stopped thinking of the three as ‘Roronoa Zoro’s swords’, a triple threat of Santoryu and rightfully kept together.

And now Roronoa is back from the dead, here to give Tashigi a heart-attack and take back his own.

 

* * *

 

Even though Zoro’s only been without his swords for a few days, this world is starting to get to him. When he stands in front of the rack holding his three swords, and only his three, it feels like an age since he’s felt their comforting weight at his side.

Zoro reclaims the black sword first, turning it over in his hands, then drawing the blade from its sheath and examining it in the lamp light. Satisfied that Tashigi had taken good care of it, he re-sheathes Shūsui and fastens it on his belt.

Zoro repeats the ritual for Kitetsu, drawing the sword, inspecting it, returning it to its red scabbard, and hitching it onto his belt.

The white sword is last. Zoro reaches for it almost desperately, aware that part of his soul is aching for the certainty of the sword’s spirit, for its strength and the memory of their shared victories. Something to hold onto, something that belongs solely to Zoro, and Zoro’s now-dead world.

Unaccountably, he is nervous. Iron bands constrict his chest, and his lungs seem to work only at half capacity. Zoro picks up the sword,

and fumbles it.

The white scabbard slips out of his grasp, and Zoro catches it with his other hand, barely managing to prevent it from hitting the floor.

The shock in the room is palpable. The crew have never seen Zoro act like a sword was anything less than an extension of his own hands. Tashigi looks appalled.

Zoro stares at Wadō, gripped tightly in his left hand. He tries to feel for the sword’s spirit, but nothing is there.

_Did she die with me?_

Zoro grasps the hilt with his right hand, but only manages to draw the sword out two inches before he stops, bile rising in the back of his throat. The sword radiates repulsion and mistrust. Zoro’s not sure how much of that is him, projecting, or the sword rejecting him. He’s frozen, staring at Wadō like it’s an alien artifact.

“Zoro?” Chopper calls his name cautiously.

Zoro jerks guiltily and looks up. His nakama are watching him with varied expressions of concern and wariness.

Zoro holds Wadō vertical, and the blades clicks back into place, fully sheathed. He fastens it with its companions at his hip, and nods brusquely in Tashigi’s direction.

“We’re good. Let’s go,” he says, and without waiting for a response, starts heading up the stairs back the way they came.

He almost collides with Sanji, who’s on his way down with a purpose. Sanji spares a brief glance for the swords at Zoro’s hip, then pushes past the swordsman and gets the attention of the rest of the crew coming up behind Zoro.

“What is it, Sanji?” Nami asks with some concern.

“So Franky and I were poking around up there, and guess what we found?” Sanji asks rhetorically. “Arrival logs show periodic visits to this villa by several of the more – how shall we say – _long-lived_ members of the Marines and the Government.”

“Oh, is that so?” Nami says, turning to Tashigi.

Tashigi moves quickly. Having grabbed one of the swords from her collection, she stabs in the direction of Nami, who manages to leap backward just in time.

Tashigi’s not interested in fighting, though; just in escape. She slashes at Sanji, easily avoiding the awkward kick he aims at her in the cramped stairway. The cook stumbles to the side, out of range of Tashigi’s quick swordplay, and she pushes past him to run up the rest of the stairs-

And pulls abruptly to a halt, the bare blade of Kitetsu at her neck.

“Forget about me?” Zoro asks, baring his teeth.

“You’re supposed to be _dead_ ,” Tashigi hisses, body rigid but eyes burning fury.

“So are you, Kuina.”

“What?”

Robin’s hands blossom out of Tashigi’s shoulders, and bend both the marine’s arms backwards, forcing her to drop her sword. Nami appears behind her, pulls a length of rope out of nowhere, and binds Tashigi’s hands behind her back.

“None of that now, Captain,” Robin tsks. “Things suddenly became more interesting. Let’s go have a look at those logs, hmm?”

 

* * *

 

“So, Captain, what _is_ this all about?” Robin asks Tashigi. Robin is lounging on a chair in Tashigi’s study, behind a table overflowing with various paper records. Robin gestures languidly, her arm sweeping to encompass the table’s contents. Tashigi stands stiffly, arms still bound, in the centre of the room, while the rest of the crew perch on various surfaces around her.

Tashigi compresses her lips, and says nothing.

Robin leans forward, her eyes two pieces of flint.

“Frequent visits to your villa by three Admirals, six vice-Admirals, four descendants of the Celestial Dragons, and numerous prominent politicians, including the rulers of several supposedly independent planet-kingdoms.”

Robin pauses, but Tashigi stares dead ahead, straight-backed and at attention, still mute.

Robin sighs. “The visits are periodic, though each visitor appears to be on a different cycle. Some come every year, some every two, three, four, or five years. It doesn’t take a great intelligence, or even an overly suspicious mind, to work out that this must have something to do with the fact that none of these people have aged in the last several decades.”

Tashigi unsticks her jaw long enough to say, “Routine inspection.”

“ _Admirals_ conducting a regular inspection on a babysitter job?” Robin asks incredulously. “Please don’t insult me.”

There’s definitely an internal struggle going on between Tashigi and something, probably her conscience, but her loyalty to her superiors keeps her silent.

Robin, sensing a weakness, adds a little more pressure.

“Surely you were not unaware of this pattern? No doubt Vice-Admiral Smoker taught you the virtue of keeping an eye on your superiors. Ordinary citizens may be happy to accept the explanation that their rulers’ longevity is just reward for their services to the people, but surely that doesn’t work on an intelligent woman like you?”

Tashigi’s eyes drop to the floor.

“They stand in the way of lawlessness and anarchy,”  Tashigi says, but she says it monotone, rote, like a mantra that has no meaning anymore.

“Who are you protecting, Tashigi?”

“He’s a criminal. He was in league with pirates. His powers are doing _good_ now.” Tashigi sounds like she’s desperately trying to convince herself.

“Is that what Smoker thought?” Robin asks quietly. Tashigi flinches like she’s been slapped.

“A week’s flight away,” Nami says, “children are imprisoned until their parents pay a governmental tax that for many is more than a year’s income.”

“Many of my patients have slave brands,” Chopper says. “The corporations pay tithes to the government and the Marines so they’ll turn a blind eye.”

“In my city, if the businesses don’t cough up enough protection money every time the Lieutenant comes around, they find themselves the victims of a terrible fire,” Sanji says.

“Half of my planet’s population are employed in government-funded research into coercive technologies,” Franky says. “I’m betting you can guess for what that’s a euphemism for.”

“There’s a Marine base on Amplio that specialises in deadly – _lethal_ – augmentations for the police forces for over two-thirds of the solar system,” Brook says.

The hard gaze of every Straw Hat drills into Tashigi.

“Tashigi,” Robin says, quietly but firmly, “this is not justice.”

Tashigi can’t look anyone in the eyes. She knows that the marines are not what they used to be – even though there had always been corruption, she had known in her heart of hearts, that _back then_ there was definite good in the uniform. But the decades passed, and somehow the people at the top never changed; there was no natural rotation of generations, and the system stagnated and became inbred and twisted.

Tashigi remembers the day Smoker simply couldn’t take it anymore, and abandoned the justice kanji that had been the guiding mark of his life. Because as much of a wrench as it was to leave the institution you’ve spend the better part of a century in, it was worse to have it force you to become the opposite of everything you stood for. Smoker had left, and Tashigi had turned in on herself, created her own little corner with her swords and her small amount of troops, telling herself that she was just following orders. That as long as _her_ actions did no harm, she didn’t have to answer to her conscience.

But Nico Robin is right. This is not justice, and a bandaid won’t do for a bullet wound. The Marines need to be torn down and remade, and while no part of Tashigi will ever consider siding with a _pirate_ , it’s undeniable that the Straw Hats have time and again served the purpose of cleansing fire.

Tashigi takes a deep breath, and betrays her government.

 

* * *

 

It turns out that Tashigi’s prisoner is a child – a curly-haired boy that decorates his room with bounty posters and model space ships.

“Gosh,” the boy says. “You’re all really here. Gosh.”

He stares at the crew wide-eyed as they cluster in the doorway of his small but well-appointed room.

“How old _are_ you?” Chopper asks from somewhere behind Zoro’s knees.

“Dunno,” the boy says, his large brown eyes still wide in amazement at the sight of the Straw Hats. “Hundred and eleven?”

“Elixir stopped growing when he ate the Vitalism devil fruit,” Tashigi says. She’s standing by the window with her arms wrapped around her torso. Her posture is tired and defeated.

“You’re here to get me out right? Wow, this is so exciting!” The boy – Elixir – bounces up and down where he sits cross-legged on his bed.

“I have zero idea of what’s going on right now,” Usopp says, and collapses in an overstuffed armchair by the door.

The rest of the crew fan out into the room. Nami sits on the bed and smiles gently at Elixir.

“How did you know we were coming?” Nami asks him.

“Because I led you here, didn’t I?”

“Did you?” Nami exchanges a glance with Robin. Tashigi’s eyes snap towards Elixir.

“Oh my _god,_ ” Elixir says, rolling his eyes. “I’ve had _nothing_ to do for a _century_ except learn how to use shiny new technology, and play around with my devil fruit. Of _course_ I led you here!”

“That’s impossible,” Tashigi says, eyes wide. “You haven’t got any access to external communications. These pirates didn’t even _know_ -”

“We knew our mysterious ally was located in this sector,” Robin interrupts smoothly, and lying only a little bit. “Elixir, you are the one responsible, then, for our seeming immortality?”

“Uh huh,” Elixir says, nodding vigorously. “I mean, I didn’t mean to get literally everyone, and I’m a lot better at it now, but yeah, basically. I’m awesome.”

“Awesome enough that you help corrupt politicians live forever,” Sanji drawls, lighting a cigarette.

Elixir flushes. “It’s not like I have much of a choice. I’m not strong enough to escape or fight back.”

Usopp eyebrows hit his hairline at this statement. “You have a devil fruit!”

“The villa is partly constructed with seastone, and all the guards have seastone weapons,” Tashigi says. “He wouldn’t get far.”

“Right! Exactly!” Elixir says. “So I healed Mr. Roronoa, and basically told you guys where he was, and you saved him and then came here to save me because I know how great and nice and kind and strong the Straw Hats are and-” Elixir stops, and looks down into his lap like he’s embarrassed.

Franky pulls a face of confusion at Robin, who shrugs.

“And what?” Chopper prompts gently, laying a hoof on Elixir’s knee.

“I wanna be a pirate,” Elixir mutters. Then, with more conviction and shining eyes, he looks up at the rest of the room. “I want to join your crew!”

There’s an awkward silence, even from Usopp, who used to bask in the starry-eyed hero worship they found wherever they went after Luffy became King.

“We’re not, uh, _technically_ a crew, anymore,” Nami says hesitantly. “We’re nakama, of course, and always will be, but…”

“Those stories you heard about us were probably exaggerated. The real world doesn’t work like that,” Sanji says harshly. “Don’t put people on a pedestal.”

Elixir shakes his head vigorously. “I _know_ you guys are good. I may look like a kid but I’m almost as old as you – and the stories _I’ve_ heard weren’t exaggerated. Please, you _have_ to take me with you. I can learn to fight! I can make you live forever!”

At the back of the room, Zoro’s lips twist into a snarl.

“Well, we’re definitely getting you out of here, lil’ bro,” Franky says. “From where I’m standing we owe you a pretty big favour.”

“He is an incredibly valuable asset. The government will hardly just let him go,” Robin points out.

“We can’t leave him here!”

“If he’s that valuable, why doesn’t he have more guards?” Usopp asks.

(“I have a _name_ ,” Elixir mutters to himself.)

“Because he is also largely a secret asset,” Robin says. “More guards would draw more attention. I am willing to bet, however, that it will be far more difficult to leave this sector than it was to enter it.”

All eyes turn to Tashigi, who looks equal parts betrayed and exhausted. She turns hollow eyes to Robin.

“I’ll disable the defences so you can leave. I don’t think-” Tashigi swallows convulsively. “I don’t think the government should have access to the vitalism devil fruit, anymore.”

Robin stares at Tashigi, trying to determine her sincerity.

“Thank you,” Robin says eventually. “And if I might suggest you make yourself scarce?”

“Yes,” says Tashigi quietly.

“So you’re taking me with you?” Elixir says, bubbling over with hope. “I’m free?”

Sanji blows a smoke ring into the ceiling. “In a manner of speaking.”

 

* * *

 

Tashigi keeps her promise – the Thousand Sunny makes it safe and unmolested into neutral space. No one says much as Nami directs Franky and Usopp to dock behind an uninhabited and non-descript moon. Once Sunny is secure, the crew gather in the galley to discuss what to do with Elixir.

“He can’t join the crew,” Sanji says immediately, almost before Franky – who was the last one to enter – makes it into the room.

“What? Why not?” Elixir exclaims from where he’s seated between Chopper and Nami.

“I agree with Sanji,” Brook says, glancing towards Sanji’s stony face. “Something like that is not our decision to make.”

“It’s also _way_ too dangerous-” Usopp begins.

“I told you before, I’m not _actually_ a child!” Elixir interrupts. “I know I don’t know much about fighting, but I’ve had years and years to practice with my devil fruit. I’m _really_ good with it!”

“It’s not about that,” Nami says. “Who we are now, well, being a pirate doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, then?” Elixir says, a little sulkily. “It’s not like I can just get a job like a normal person. I’ll be scooped up by the first marine that sees me.”

“We’re gonna protect you, but that may be less glamorous than you thought it would be,” Franky rumbles. “Like I said, we owe you a pretty big favour,” he continues, looking over to Zoro.

Zoro is not sitting at the table with everyone else, but is instead leaning against the back wall. He’s scowling, and has Elixir pinned with an intense stare. Elixir is too busy defending himself to the rest of the crew to notice this.

“Well that’s part of it, isn’t it? I got you Roronoa Zoro back, so you can become a crew again. The Straw Hats, right? I mean, I know Luffy isn’t…” Elixir trails off, but then recovers. “But you can carry on in his name! Like you said to Captain Tashigi – and I know ‘cause I was listening in – there’s too much injustice in the world. You guys used to help, and stop that. You know, save people.”

Robin sighs, gently. “Elixir, Luffy had his own, very definitive, worldview that did not _per se_ seek to revolutionise. The Straw Hat crew as a marker of some sort vigilante justice would, quite frankly, be a disaster. _You_ may miss the Romantic Era, but all we are trying to do, right now, is survive.”

Elixir’s jaw juts out stubbornly. “Yeah, and who do you have to thank for that, huh? What happens when the treatment runs out, and you age ten decades in a day?”

This causes a murmuring restlessness among the crew. They glance at each other, trying to determine what to do with the idealistic, but powerful, boy in front of them.

Zoro, on the other hand, has had enough.

“Where is his body?” the swordsman demands of Elixir.

“What?” Nami asks.

“They kept my body,” Zoro says, still looking at Elixir. “In the chaos, they found it and kept it and preserved it like a perverse trophy. _They kept his too_. Where, _is it_?”

Robin makes a soft noise of realisation. “Oh. Of course.”

Tension wells in the room. Nami’s eyes narrow and, heart in her throat, she asks: “Are you talking about _Luffy_?”

Zoro’s “Who _else_ ” is drowned out as the crew erupts in noise and questions, demanding to know if this is true and how Zoro knows and if _Elixir_ knows and why didn’t he tell them-

Elixir waves his hands defensively in front of himself.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he says. “I thought you knew.”

Sanji slams his hands on the table, making Elixir jump.

“Where are they keeping Luffy?” the cook demands of the boy.

“I don’t know,” Elixir says, a whine creeping into his voice. “They guard Luffy’s body much, _much_ more closely than they did Mr. Roronoa. And I’m not even supposed to know _that_!”

“But you can help us find out more, can’t you, Elixir?” Robin says, sliding her small portable screen across the table, stopping under Elixir’s nose.

The boy pauses, looks at the determined faces surrounding him, and then nods meekly. He reaches for the device and, under the intense gazes of every single member of the Straw Hat crew, Elixir spends few seconds busily tapping on the screen.

“I’m having difficulty with- uh, do you have something more powerful? And a secure connection to the network?” he asks, eyes still on Robin’s device.

“I’ll show you,” Usopp says, leaping up from his chair like a spring, wound up with nervous energy.

Usopp leads Elixir out of the room, and Robin sails after them.

Franky exhales noisily in the silence left behind. “All this time,” he says morosely. “Zoro _and_ Luffy, right under our goddamn noses.”

Chopper’s lower lip wibbles. Nami side-hugs the small doctor, needing some comfort herself.

Sanji taps out a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, and lights it. “Now the question we want to ask ourselves,” he says around the cigarette, “is whether it will be worth taking on what is no doubt most of the marine force, in order to rescue a _dead_ body.”

There’s a sound like cutting silk, and the lit half of Sanji’s cigarette spirals through the air and lands, still smouldering, on the tablecloth.

Brook hastily crushes the stub, while Sanji spits out tobacco leaves and Zoro re-sheathes Kitetsu.

Eyes like flint, Zoro says, “ _I_ was dead.”

“Except you clearly _weren’t_ ,” Sanji hisses, angry at this version of Zoro that’s still grieving, that’s in denial, that’s bringing back everything Sanji has been trying to repress for the last century. “You also weren’t protected by the galaxy’s most powerful martial force.”

“We’re strong enough to defeat them,” Zoro says with utter conviction.

“ _We?!_ ” Sanji says, voice high in disbelief. “What ‘ _we_ ’? In case you haven’t fucking noticed, there’s a bit of an issue with _crew cohesion_ going on here!”

“That’s enough,” Brook says firmly, stepping in front of Sanji and blocking his view of Zoro. Sanji hears heavy footsteps, the galley door open, and then slam shut. For want of a better opponent, Sanji glares at Brook.

“He’s grieving, Sanji,” Brook says. “It’s the first stage-”

“Bull-fucking-shit. He _saw it_ , just as we did, in fact his memories are clearer than ours! It’s not goddamn denial, he fucking well _knows_ our Captain is dead! But that stupid idiot thinks that getting Luffy’s body back will somehow make everything alright again but it won’t, it _won’t_ , we’ll just have to bury our Captain all fucking over again and I can’t, Brook, I can’t do that again, I can’t watch as we fall apart and-”

The rest of Sanji’s words are muffled as Franky steps forward and pulls Sanji into a manly hug. Chopper shuffles over, and Nami, and Brook, and they form a protective circle around their trembling cook.

Nobody says it’s going to be okay. It’s been more or less a hundred years of this already.

Because if Zoro’s gotten stuck on denial, Sanji only ever got as far as anger.


	4. Chapter 4

_Knock, knock._

“Enter.”

A nervous-looking man edges around the enormous imitation oak door. His bottom lip has a spot of blood on it, where his teeth have punctured the skin in his anxiety.

The man behind the desk is already annoyed. “What _is_ it, Johnson?”

Johnson clears his throat. “Well, sir, it’s… I mean, they… It was decided…”

“Spit it _out_ , man! I have things to do!”

The next sentence comes out in a rush. “They’ve decided to move the last trophy, sir.”

The man leaps out of the chair, enraged, and Johnson winces.

“Are they _idiots_?! He’s under so much security God himself couldn’t spirit him away, and they want to _move_ him?”

“Sorry, sir. Uh, they’re also going to put you in charge of the move, sir.”

A twitch develops in the man’s left eyebrow. “You do know we _will_ be attacked, right?”

Johnson correctly interprets this question as rhetorical, and keeps silent.

The Admiral forcefully blows air out his nostrils like an angry bull. “I knew this was going to happen. Letting them keep trophies for the sake of their own egos was always going to be a bad idea. They’re so fucking scared of the Straw Hats they can’t even be trusted with a _dead body_. You are _dismissed_ , Johnson.”

The hapless marine scuttles out the room, closing the door behind him with exaggerated carefulness.

“This will pull the remaining Straw Hats out of hiding,” the Admiral says to the room at large. “Obviously they’re trying to use the body as bait. Roronoa and the others will no doubt attempt to recover the trophy when it’s being moved. And if I fail to protect it, they will use it as an excuse to get rid of me.”

There’s no response to the man’s monologue.

“They’re stagnating,” the Admiral continues. “They hate me since I’m not one of the _old boys_ , but what they don’t see is that they grow _weak_. Their bodies don’t age but their _minds_ might as well belong to drooling incompetents. They have allowed the fear of _ghosts_ to keep them paralysed. If the Pirate King was so powerful, he wouldn’t be _dead_.”

The Admiral’s eyes flicker to the corner of the room. “Roronoa isn’t a god, and he doesn’t belong to this age. _I do_. When Roronoa makes his move, I will be there to stop him and I will _personally_ make sure that this time he _stays_ dead.”

A small chuckle comes from the corner of the room. “We shall see.”

 

* * *

 

The plan the crew ends up with is not… great. They’ve had worse – any time the words ‘Luffy’ and ‘stealth’ were used together, for example – but Robin’s still worried. If they’re going to have a fighting chance of getting away with Luffy's body, they have to act while the body’s being moved from its current facility to its new destination on board what Usopp described as a ‘fuck-off big spaceship’. The transfer is happening two days from now, so this doesn’t leave them with much time; in fact, most of their preparatory time will be spent getting to the planet in question, which is called, as per the cyclical laws of Fate, Raftel.

It's thanks to Elixir’s skill with technology that they know this; Elixir’s abilities outstrip even Robin’s – he, of course, has the advantage of having had nothing else to do for decades but learn how to navigate government systems, and Robin is not envious of that.

They choose a path of approach that will take them through an asteroid field, which Franky and Nami will expertly navigate and which will hopefully bring with it the element of surprise. A carefully timed electromagnetic pulse will take down the majority of communications and sentries, to delay any reinforcements. It is absolutely essential they get to Luffy before his body is transferred onto the large spaceship, and which from the schematics appears to be approximately the size of a large moon and equipped with more offensive defence than Robin has ever seen. The role of the spaceship is supposedly research – Robin severely doubts that.

(The name of the ship, to her disgust, is _One Piece_. If Robin ever finds out who is responsible for that piece of irony, there will not be enough left to bury.)

So the plan is to wait among the asteroids, EMP anything that moves, and then ambush the smaller interplanetary shuttle that will be taking Luffy from Raftel to the large ship. Grab Luffy, and get away as quickly as possible. Do _not_ engage.

Zoro’s not pleased with this plan. He, of course, wants to go in guns blazing. Robin can understand that. Zoro wants _blood_. Wants _revenge_. Robin would quite like it, however, if they could all get out of this alive, and that includes Zoro. Which is why the plan worries her, because there are too many unknown elements, and too many things that can go wrong.

And because Luffy is not here to fix things when they do.

Robin is, as usual, right.

 

* * *

 

A hush permeates the ship as the Straw Hats approach the Raftel system, as if any noise they make on board Sunny might shatter the hasty attempt at stealth. Zoro hovers in the doorway of the control room as Franky and Usopp jointly guide the ship through the belt of floating rocks that’s meant to serve as their cover. The only sound is Nami’s soft instructions for course correction.

The ship is dark, in an attempt to foil any photon sensors. The only source of light is the soft glow emitted by the screens scattered about the room.

Suddenly, a lamp to Zoro’s immediate right lights up, bathing the swordsman’s face in a red glow. Something beeps, and Usopp looks up sharply. The lamp then begins to pulse, splashing warning red in flashes over the walls of the control room.

Urgently Franky reaches past Usopp and pulls a lever. The cyborg then rushes out of the room at a thundering run – Zoro follows, heartbeat thudding in his ears – and up the stairs on deck to reach Sunny’s steering wheel. Behind Zoro, Nami starts screaming something into the ship’s broadcast system.

Zoro reaches Franky – who, wild-eyed, starts to say something, pushing Zoro away – just as the ship judders, a deep shaking that Zoro feels begin at his feet and travel up through his bones. There’s a moment of silence and stillness,

and then the ship tilts ninety degrees sideways, tipping Zoro into freefall.

Franky magnetises to the ship’s deck, and, wrenching the steering wheel to one side, yells an incoherent battle cry. Zoro feels the ship’s engines kick in, just before he slams into Sunny’s railings. Though jarred, Zoro has enough presence of mind to grab a railing – ordinarily vertical, now horizontal – and pull himself flat against it. He can feel, through the gaps in the wood, the subtle press of the field bubble that encases Sunny, keeping them all breathing, warm, and at a humanly-bearable pressure. The bubble will not, however, prevent a fully grown man from flying into the unforgiving vacuum of space.

Sunny’s engines roar, but the ship continues to accelerate downward. Zoro looks down, and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The looming shape of Raftel fills his vision as Sunny screams through the atmosphere on a crash course for the planet’s red and brown surface.

Raftel gets closer. Zoro fancies he can see the individual shapes and textures of rocks. He begins climbing the horizontal railing like a ladder, hoping to reach a safer place before Sunny hits those rocks, Zoro first.

Something taps him on the shoulder. He turns – a small, delicate hand is there, sprouting out of the woodwork. It’s pointing and beckoning urgently up the deck. Zoro’s eye follows the frantic gesturing and he sees several dozen more hands sprouting from the vertical deck, perpendicular to the railing, and heading towards the open galley door.

Robin is leaning out of the galley, her face intent and her arms curled in front of her chest in her battle pose. Her shouted words are lost in the roaring of Sunny’s overworked engines, but Zoro gets the gist. He changes direction and begins climbing the ladder of hands up the vertical deck, each of Robin's hands pulling him up by his forearms and pushing him up by his ankles.

Closer to the galley door he can see Robin leaning dangerously far out, and behind her Chopper in heavy point, holding onto her belt and bracing himself on either side of the doorframe. Zoro is almost to the galley door when the ship’s engines emit a piercing, high-pitched whine, and abruptly shut down. No longer slowed down by the counter force of the engines, the ship covers the remaining distance to the planet’s surface at breakneck speed.

Sunny hits the ground, bounces once, and then slams into a large rock, skidding and slipping for several more metres before finally coming to rest in the middle of an open, rocky field.

 

* * *

 

Sanji curses and coughs as he pulls himself out of the wreckage of his kitchen. He climbs over the upturned table, and makes his way through the galley door to the deck of Sunny, thankfully now the right way up.

“Is everyone okay?” Sanji calls out. “Nami? Robin?”

“I’m fine,” Nami says, staggering out of the control room opposite. Usopp, following her out, moans dramatically and flops to the ground.

“I have suffered a mortal wound,” he says, woebegone. Chopper scrambles off Robin’s lap where she sits on deck, and rushes over to Usopp.

“Really, Usopp, it’s just a splinter,” Chopper tuts as he pulls the offending object out of Usopp’s arm.

“It’s ten inches long!”

“Where’s Franky?” Nami asks, sagging against the cracked but still upright mast.

“Here,” Franky says, coming down from the steering platform. There’s a trickle of blood running down the side of his face, and blue fluid leaking from his side. “Several dents, but none to the flesh.”

“Robin?” Sanji asks breathlessly.

“A few bruises, but no other damage.” Robin musters a small smile for Sanji. “Chopper pulled me back inside just before we landed.”

“Yohoho! I, too, am fine!” comes a yell from above them. Brook is climbing down the rigging, a plainly terrified Elixir clinging monkey-like to his side. The musician reaches the deck and gently pries Elixir loose. “We took shelter in the crow’s nest. What a view!”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Elixir whimpers, sitting down hard.

“And Zoro?” says Franky, looking about. “He was on deck. I lost sight of him when we got hit.”

“I’m sorry,” Robin says in a soft voice. “He slipped out of my grasp when we crashed. I didn’t see what happened to him.” Robin’s eyes are suspiciously bright, her poise temporarily shattered by the memory of Zoro’s calloused hand grabbing at her own, and then being wrenched apart.

“I'm sure he's fine,” Sanji says hurriedly, disarmed in the face of Robin’s distress. “It definitely takes more than that to kill him.”

The rest of the crew winces at the poor choice of words, but Robin, unexpectedly, laughs.

“Indeed Sanji, recent events have proven you right,” she says. “I’m sure we will find him not far from here, cursing us for having the temerity to get lost.”

“What bought us down, Franky?” Nami asks.

“I’m not sure, but whatever it was took out the navigation, buoyancy, and gravitational systems all at once. If the engines hadn’t come online, we would be red smears against the landscape right now.”

Usopp swallows audibly. “We should-”

“Enemies incoming!” Brook yells, pointing behind everyone.

The Straw Hats turn. Marching across the landscape are in excess of a thousand marines, accompanied by a large armoured cart, and orbited by several pieces of differently shaped lethal-looking technology.

“ _Shit_ ,” Nami swears.

Franky shoves Elixir towards the control room. “You know how to fix things, right bro? Sunny’s not completely grounded. If you can get the buoyancy and the grav boost back, we can get out of here.”

“I don’t- I’ve never-” Elixir stutters.

“Now’s the time to learn!” Franky says, propelling the boy into the control room and closing the door behind him. “Battle stations everyone, this is _not_ going to be super!”

 

* * *

 

What it is, is a fucking mess. They had started fighting on Sunny, a defensible position with some offensive capability, but were soon overwhelmed and forced to retreat and break up. The rocky plain becomes a chaotic, all-out battlefield.

Brook finds himself fighting side by side with Usopp, then Chopper rushes by, knee-capping a cyborg-marine as he passes, and Brook is swept by the wave of battle onwards. Robin’s hands grapple a floating turret as Brook’s cane sword slices it in two, then the skeleton is forced to duck as Franky looses a cannon shot and briefly creates a gap in the surge of bodies, which is soon filled up.

The Straw Hats are keeping tabs on each other. One of the things that Brook one day wants to write a song about is the way his nakama flow around each other in battle, synergetic, harmonious, synchronic.

Except Zoro – and it isn’t like Zoro to miss a battle, but Brook has yet to spot the tell-tale flash of green anywhere. He has to believe that that means Zoro is lost, not squashed.

A marine moving faster that he ought to be able to charges aggressively towards Brook, only to be stopped somewhat permanently short by Sanji’s axe-kick. In return, Brook blocks the swing of a broadsword that was lazily seeking Sanji’s head.

Brook follows the line of the sword up to its owner. “Oh my,” he says. “I did not expect to encounter you ever again, Dracule Mihawk.”

Sanji spins around at Brook’s words and finds, lo and behold, Hawkeyes and his naked blade.

“Don’t tell me you’re back working for the government?” Sanji snarls. “After _everything_?”

Brook trips an advancing enemy, clubbing the marine in the back of the head as he falls. Oddly enough, an empty circle has formed around Mihawk, their enemies seeming to prefer to seek opponents elsewhere.

Mihawk, uncharacteristically, smiles widely enough to be accused of grinning.

“I convinced the Admiral I would be useful,” Mihawk drawls. “I was particularly interested in recent events.”

Sanji snorts. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a bit too busy to indulge in a re-match right now.”

“‘We’?” Mihawk asks, irony lacing his voice. His golden eyes inspect the surrounding battlefield. “I don’t see the opponent I seek. Is he still… ill?”

“I had heard,” Mihawk continues, with a certain amount of anticipation, “that rumours of Roronoa’s death had been greatly exaggerated.”

Sanji bares his teeth. “The last thing Zoro needs right now is _more_ old ghosts.” Sanji lifts his leg threateningly. “Are you here to _talk_ or _fight_?”

Mihawk shrugs, and then blindingly quickly swings his greatsword – the same shape as his original preferred weapon – in a wide, slicing arc. Sanji doesn’t move. The wind caused by the movement lifts a few strands of blond hair. To his left and right, five marines scream and collapse, their hamstrings cut.

“A bit disloyal of you,” Brook murmurs.

Mihawk laughs, a light chuckle of concealed eagerness. Sanji is reminded abruptly of their own swordsman, and the red and black clash between them that had resulted in Zoro, finally, claiming the World’s Greatest title.

“Collateral damage,” Mihawk says, as he readies his sword in front of himself.

Shanks had been there for The Duel, to Luffy’s delight and probably Mihawk’s chagrin. At the celebration afterwards, part of Shank’s – uncalled for – toast had included him roaring, to an equally drunk crowd, that Shanks hadn’t seen Mihawk that alive for _years_ , and three cheers to Roronoa for lighting a fire under the old bastard’s arse.

After all that, a century without a worthy opponent must have been rather boring.

“Are the both of you to be my opponent?” Mihawk inquires, golden eyes flashing between Sanji and Brook.

Sanji glances across the battlefield. He can make out the thunderclouds of Nami’s climatact not far away, and another resounding explosion suggests Franky’s work. Despite the fact that they are holding their own, the Straw Hats are heavily outnumbered with many marines still standing.

“Brook, go help the others,” Sanji says. “I’ll take care of this.”

Brook nods and takes off without hesitation, confident in Sanji’s power.

“And for godsakes find Zoro!” Sanji yells after him.

Mihawk smirks. “Roronoa does have a habit of getting lost.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Sanji mutters, disliking Mihawk’s casual appropriation of Zoro’s character. Only his nakama get to make fun of him, dammit.

Once again, Sanji lifts his leg. Swirls of steam and smoke eddy around his glowing foot.

“Let’s go, old man.”

 

* * *

 

Zoro comes to with a blinding headache pounding behind his eyes. Which is more or less to be expected after being flung off the deck of a ship free-falling from space. Zoro tries to stand up, waits until the world has stopped tilting alarmingly, and then tries again. He is remarkably uninjured. A sharp pain every time he breaths in might be a couple of broken ribs, or maybe it’s the same psychosomatic sensation of having his heart cut out he’s been experiencing since he woke up.

Other than that, a mild concussion and a monstrous case of road rash are Zoro’s only complaints; he’s fortunate he slid instead of bounced. His swords are still in place, and in the not-to-far distance Zoro sees a haze of rising smoke that suggests Sunny’s crash site. He sets off in that direction.

It’s not long until Zoro reaches the edges of a battlefield. The corpses of several marines are scattered across the ground. Ahead, the still alive are continuing to battle, with pockets of fighting concentrated inhomogeneously. Out of the corner of Zoro’s eye, he sees a flash, like sunlight off steel, a glimpse that tugs at the edges of his memory, but the rest of Zoro has already spotted the tank-like vehicle squatting in the centre of a particularly dense mass of marines. There’s no other place that Luffy could be.

Zoro draws two swords – Wadō whispers and rages and pleads from her sheath – and advances inexorably forward, demon of death.

 

* * *

 

Sanji somersaults ten feet into the air, springboarding off the head of a marine, which subsequently becomes separated from the rest of its owner by Mihawk’s sword. Sanji lands somewhat clumsily, having to move again immediately to avoid Mihawk’s follow-up swing. Panting, Sanji manages to put several paces between him and the smirking swordsman. Mihawk twirls his sword once, but otherwise lets Sanji have his timeout.

Sanji catches his breath. He wouldn’t say he’s _out of practice_ , but the last time Sanji saw an all-out battle was at least fifty years ago, and he has always fought through necessity rather than choice. Mihawk, on the other hand, clearly hasn’t lost any of his edge, the bastard.

Still, even though the best hit Sanji had managed to land was a glancing blow to Mihawk’s elbow, Mihawk wasn’t getting very far either. The swordsman had gone for Sanji’s hamstring, but had only managed to slash a line down the cook’s leg, though Sanji had the feeling the irritating man was holding back. On the up side, Mihawk’s wide, slashing attacks had also been doing a number on the surrounding marines, since Mihawk didn’t seem to care about collateral damage and Sanji had kept moving into dense clumps of enemies in order to exploit this.

Sanji shifts his weight onto one foot, indicating he’s ready to resume the fight. Mihawk, who seems to be in this more for fun and anarchy than the righteous victory of the just, nods happily and raises his sword.

 

* * *

 

Zoro cleaves once, twice. Metal shatters and pings, sharp splinters fly past his face, chunks of armour and arms hit the hard ground with soft thumps.

It’s supremely unsatisfying. Robotic soldiers bleed wires and coat his swords with oddly glowing fluid, and give Zoro none of the battle-joy that blood would bring with it. The robots only seem to have one way of acting, a basic set of movements that makes them useless on any actual battlefield, but good for cannon fodder – or against unarmed citizens.

It doesn’t matter. Zoro just has to get through this wall of automatons, get to the tank-like cart, because he can _see_ Luffy’s prison – a cylinder on its side, so much like the one he himself was ejected from not too long ago. A third slice, a fourth, and Zoro reaches out a hand to touch the cold glass-

The world shimmers around him. His vision is filled with white static; the battlefield flickers back in, and then away again. The ground seems to tilt, vertiginous, and Zoro shuts his eyes instinctively. When he opens them again, the hard pebbled ground has been replaced with swathes of soft green grass. The coral-coloured sky of Raftel is now a hazy summer’s blue, and, most importantly, the armoured cart that was holding Luffy ( _Luffy’s body_ ) is gone.

Zoro whirls. There is nothing but an endless field of green, blowing gently in a non-existent wind. It feels like grass and cuts like it. Zoro takes a few tentative steps forward, but he doesn’t ram face-first into anything solid. There’s nothing in front of him.

“What the hell?” Zoro asks the air, voice rumbling with annoyance and confusion.

A shift of _something_ makes Zoro spin around. Before him stands a man Zoro has never seen before. He is about as tall as Zoro, dressed immaculately in an expensive-looking black three-piece suit, and wearing a smug smile. Around his shoulders he wears the epauleted cape of a marine admiral.

“Hello, Roronoa Zoro,” the Admiral says.

“Who are you? What is this?” Zoro demands.

The Admiral smiles wider. “I am the man who will take your captain’s body out of your reach forever. And I will send you back to the dead where you belong.”

That’s all the explanation Zoro needs. In one smooth movement, Zoro steps forward, raises Shūsui and Kitetsu, and separates the Admiral’s head from his shoulders. The head falls to the grass and rolls about a foot away. There’s no blood.

“Oh dear,” the head says. “Such impulsiveness, such aggression.”

An _oh shit_ feeling rises up in Zoro’s chest, an instinct he learned a while ago from Usopp, and it took him an embarrassingly long time to realise it, but the instinct’s name is self-preservation. His inner Usopp tells Zoro that there’s more to his opponent than meets the eye, and that he may be in for a bad time.

The Admiral’s body walks over to the head, picks it up, and puts it back in place. Now whole again, the Admiral shakes his head in disappointment. Then, between one breath and the next, he is standing behind Zoro, uncomfortably close. The Admiral lifts an arm and points forward over Zoro’s shoulder, but Zoro has already seen. For there, standing in the green grass, silhouetted against the blue sky and smiling so stunningly, enough to be his own sun, is Luffy.

Zoro is rooted to the spot. It must be a trap – but maybe Luffy is imprisoned here too, body and soul separate – does Zoro have to free this part of him too? – and what has the Admiral done with Zoro’s body, and incidentally the rest of the real world?

“I’ve been fortunate enough to eat the Virtuality devil fruit,” the Admiral explains. “It gives me the modest ability to control technical systems – that’s how I brought down your ship, of course – but it also allows me to draw power out of any electrical system around me. And here, on my battlefield, that is a _lot_ of power.”

The Admiral takes a deep, satisfied breath. “The information that chokes the air around you, the very electrons in your brain, they are _mine_. I can make you see and hear anything I wish. _None_ of this,” the Admiral waves a hand, encompassing the entirety of their surroundings, “is real.”

Zoro jerks forward a few steps towards Luffy – the appearance of Luffy – then stops. He spins, helpless, to face his true opponent. His swords will do no good here. The Admiral regards him with amusement.

“So I can’t hurt you,” Zoro narrows his eyes at the man, “ _but_ you can’t hurt me, either.”

The Admiral laughs, and shrugs. “I don’t have to touch you, physically, to hurt you. You may _know_ it’s all fake, but it will feel, and look, and smell, and sound, so _very real_.”

With that, the Admiral – or the projection of him – disappears, and the scenery flickers again. Green grass smears into churned mud, and the sky slides to an overcast dusk. Zoro’s breath catches in his throat as the sound comes rushing in – yells of rage and screams of pain, the sharp retort of pistols and the clang of swords. And up there, on the platform: Luffy, about to bisected by two blades.

Zoro yells incoherently. This time, instead of fighting, he tries his hardest to get to Luffy. Sheathing his swords, Zoro clambers over bodies both alive and dead, ignoring the wounds he sustains in the process. He reaches the wooden platform and is halfway up it before the entire scene vanishes. Zoro falls to the ground with a thump, suddenly uninjured. The Admiral is there again, laughing.

“Sorry,” he says between chuckles, “I couldn’t resist. But that was just a little _amuse_ - _bouche_. Those memories are far too fresh to be effective, a little too clear on the line between real and virtual. You see,” the Admiral continues, pontificating while Zoro stands up, “I am a student of psychology. And I like to flatter myself that I’ve gotten quite a nice little technique for subduing citizens who might… resist arrest. It’s hardly messy at all, and most of them even survive. What I mean, Roronoa, is that I don’t have to lay a finger on you. All I have to do is turn your mind inside out, and have someone else deal with the gibbering creature that’s left behind.”

Futilely Zoro lunges at the Admiral, hands grasping a warm neck that immediately disappears from beneath his fingers.

“Let us begin,” says a disembodied voice.

 

* * *

 

He sits by Nami’s bedside for hours, bathing her sweat-cold skin, listening to her rasping breaths as they slow down and eventually stop. Sanji’s hands explode at the wrists, spraying warm blood over Zoro’s face as the cook _screams_. Chopper dies in the snow, alone, eyes glazed over in the quiet death of cold. Usopp’s face morphs into that of a lonely, old man, family-less, one who never found the strength to go to sea. Franky is crushed between metal wheels and metal rails, squashed flat.

Wind whips past Zoro’s face as the Going Merry flies through half-air half-sea. He feels the breathless joy of his nakama, of Luffy particularly, as they shout their ambitions to the heavens. Their promises bind them to each other, trusting in their young luck and energy to carry them through the Grand Line.

Vivi bleeds out, throat cut deep, and Zoro tries desperately to stem the flow of blood as it clumps the sand in his fingers. Dryness lashes Zoro’s throat as water is leeched from his skin, his captain’s desiccated body already half buried under a dune. Robin is crushed beneath several tonnes of falling stone, Zoro by her side, gripping her dust-covered forearm.

Alcohol leaves a delicious burn sliding down his throat, strong sky-brewed beer that reminds him they just beat a god. Chopper’s delighted laugh rings out as Luffy whirls the reindeer around in the firelight, and Usopp’s outrageous re-telling of the fight makes the Skypieans laugh uproariously. Then Zoro remembers lightning arcing through his body and his muscles lock in fear.

Kuma lies, takes Zoro’s head and then Luffy’s, and then Nami’s and Usopp’s and Sanji’s and Franky’s and Chopper’s and Robin’s. Brook crumbles to dust as the sun rises. Mihawk’s blade slices Zoro in half, Luffy drowns a thousand times, Sanji loses both legs. Nami falls down the stairs and hits her head, Usopp tumbling after. Robin sobs as Franky burns alive, molten rivers of metal running down blistered skin. Zoro kneels by Luffy as he cradles his brother’s dead body, and screams raw and desperate and tells Zoro he wasn’t good enough, wasn’t quick enough, it’s all his fault.

It had been warm and bright all day. The sea had been sweet to them, surrendering plenty of fish for the larder. On the deck in the twilight, Sanji sets a table for nine with their finest china. He pulls out all the stops for dinner, and Luffy even eats with a knife and fork. Robin blows out the candles on a rich chocolate torte and Sanji raises his glass in toast and Zoro thinks _no, please, let me stay here_.

Robin’s body falls off the wall, a burning flag lighting her way down. A leopard, a giraffe, and a wolf all attack Luffy at once, and phantoms bind seastone chains around his limbs so he can’t fight back. Zoro draws all the swords he can, but his attacks bounce off the animals. They turn to him, snarling, and tear chunks out of his flesh, and then they’re back on Luffy scraping his skin with claws and teeth. Zoro lies bleeding on the floor, watching his captain being torn apart, when he suddenly remembers, with great clarity, how this fight is _supposed_ to go.

_That’s fucking ENOUGH._

Zoro draws out his anger and pain and wraps himself in it.

 

* * *

 

Sanji’s handstand whirlwind kick knocks out two augmented assholes, and nearly takes Mihawk’s hat off. The swordsman now has a couple of cracked ribs, but Sanji has his own share of nicks, and a deep gash on his arm that’s definitely going to need stitches. In addition, irritatingly, a momentary lapse of attention (knocking out a sniper aiming for Chopper) had allowed Mihawk to step into Sanji’s space and leave a little piece of mockery behind. A shallow cut now overlays Sanji’s torso, a long diagonal line that’s barely bleeding enough to colour the blue shirt around it.

So Sanji’s not a little pissed, and wondering how long this fight is going to last. Squaring off against Mihawk again, Sanji’s debating whether to go for the face or the neck when an awful high-pitched sound drills through his brain, staggering him momentarily. The sound is vaguely reminiscent of the time Sanji’s first (cheap, second-hand) computer had decided to die, emitting an ear-piercing whine that scraped down Sanji’s spine and set the neighbour’s dogs to furious barking. The sound is like that, but much, much worse.

Sanji sees Mihawk likewise falter, and wince. Mihawk lowers his sword, his gaze fixed past Sanji, to his left. Sanji turns, but can’t see anything unusual except – wait, yes, there stands Zoro in the distance. Just standing; not moving, not talking, not fighting.

“I see,” murmurs Mihawk. “An outcome to be expected.”

“What?” asks Sanji sharply.

“It is a pity I will not be able to say ‘I told you so’, but we can’t have everything,” Mihawk says, mostly to himself. Then, to Sanji: “I find I suddenly have pressing business to attend to elsewhere. If Roronoa Zoro should ever find himself itching for a fight with a _real_ opponent,” Mihawk smirks, and Sanji glowers, “tell him to call on me.”

And with that Mihawk sheathes his sword across his back, and strides in the opposite direction to where Zoro is standing. Sanji briefly contemplates going after him and kicking him in the head, but there are still several marines around and his nakama are still fighting. Sanji consoles himself with inflicting four concussions and a broken kneecap on nearby enemies, then goes looking to see if his darling Nami or charming Robin need an admiring audience.

 

* * *

 

Luffy screams in pain. Zoro blocks it out. Tells himself it’s not real. He gets up, turns his back on his captain. Behind him, there’s an animal snarl and a fleshy thud. The screams stop. Zoro doesn’t turn around.

The environment flickers again. Going Merry’s funeral, and Usopp’s sobs muffled beneath his mask. Luffy, on his small boat, suddenly falls backwards into the water. Zoro doesn’t move, even as Sanji and Nami scream in his face to do something, Luffy can’t swim, does he _want_ his captain to drown?

Zoro doesn’t move. Doesn’t react, even as the strings of the Birdcage slice his body to tatters. Doesn’t speak, as Sanji denounces Luffy with utter sincerity.  Doesn’t dare breathe. He focuses on the rage that each memory invokes – every time something hurts his crew, doesn’t go the way it’s _supposed_ to, Zoro’s own impotence and _weakness_.

Zoro’s not even paying attention anymore; the scene changes from a suffocatingly hot ship’s cabin – Zoro has no idea why he’s there – to a blank, empty room. The Admiral appears in front of Zoro, and slaps him across the face.

“Don’t check out now, not just yet,” the Admiral snarls. Zoro stares blankly ahead, and the Admiral rolls his eyes. “It’ll honestly be over a lot faster if you just accept it,” he drawls. “Why don’t you-”

The Admiral stops abruptly. A dark red mist is pooling at Zoro’s feet. Zoro takes a slow, deep breath, pulling the Admiral’s attention to his face. Zoro’s pupils are blown wide, making his eyes seem pitch black. His expression is terrifying, countenance cruel and ruthless, lips pulled back and teeth somehow sharper.

“What are you doing? You don’t have any power here!” The Admiral starts backing away, then realises what he’s doing and stands his ground. He points at Zoro. “No matter what you make yourself look like, you don’t have the power to hurt me. _I_ am the only one who can control the network.”

The red mist expands, ribbons of it rising up and wrapping themselves around Zoro’s legs, torso, arms. The ribbons decoalesce, flux, and Zoro is soon encased in a dark aura of hatred and bloodlust. His head whips to the left, to the right, to the front again, and each time leaves an image of itself behind that doesn’t disappear. Zoro draws Shūsui and Kitetsu, and then draws them twice more each. A toss of his heads, and a phantom Wadō solidifies between each set of teeth. Glowing blood red, a three-headed Asura demon bearing Roronoa Zoro’s face brings nine swords to bear on the Admiral.

“It’s not possible,” the Admiral whispers. “Not even the strongest men I’ve defeated have been able to create an avatar within my realm. It’s not possible, do you hear me?!” The red mist roils across the distance between them, and the Admiral takes a few hasty steps backwards. He makes an impatient gesture. “It is no matter. You have no idea what you’re doing. This is _my_ time, _not_ yours, and here in the virtuality you have _no_ hope of defeating me!”

The Admiral claps his hands together once, and disappears. Zoro closes his eyes and pirouettes gracefully, creating a deadly whirlwind of steel. The Admiral appears in mid-air, caught in the tornado of Zoro’s blades. Shock is written across his face as he is flung to the ground. His expensive suit hangs on him in strips, but the Admiral’s avatar is otherwise uninjured.

“You are nothing but electrons!” the Admiral says desperately, crawling backwards. “All is information, and I own information!”

He raises an arm towards Zoro, and a mountain’s worth of rock falls on the swordsman’s head. The Admiral’s eyes widen in disbelief as some of the rocks split where they touch Zoro’s swords, and others pass straight through his body. The Admiral curses, disappears-

And immediately re-appears.

“ _No_ ,” Zoro says.

Zoro advances on the Admiral, who is struggling to his feet. The Admiral breathes rapidly, panicking, and tries to vanish again, somehow slide sideways through the ether. He can’t leave. For the first time, he too is trapped in his virtual world. And it is _terrifying_.

Kyutoryu cuts the Admiral to pieces. The avatar reforms again, and Zoro mercilessly cuts the head off. Again it reforms, as the Admiral desperately draws power out of anything, everything, trying to regain control.

(Around the Straw Hats, robots and turrets suddenly drop to ground, inert.)

 Zoro executes the Admiral again, head and arms and legs. And again. And again. Several more times, and each time the atom-sharp edges of Zoro’s swords slice away more and more of the Admiral’s being.

“Stop,” the Admiral's voice says eventually. It is weak and distorted, like through a bad radio. “Enough. You win, stop.”

Zoro does not stop. It is far, _far_ too late for that. Eventually, the empty room disappears. There are rocks beneath Zoro’s feet and he can hear the clash and roar of fighting, though dully, as if through cotton wool. The Admiral still kneels in front of him.

Distantly, Zoro wonders how the Admiral still has the strength to create any sort of environment. It doesn’t matter. Zoro lifts his swords for the final blow. His arms shake with fury and fatigue. Unbidden, a surge of haki races through his muscles like lactic acid and encases his swords, blurring their edges. Zoro allows the wave of power to tug himself forward, and pull his arms back. In one inexorable movement, with the entirety of his power behind it, Zoro cuts the Admiral’s head off.

 

* * *

 

An enormous wave of haki floods the battlefield, arresting almost all movement. Chopper feels suddenly dizzy and nauseous, so powerful was the force; behind him he can hear Usopp actually throwing up. The marine pinned beneath Chopper’s Heavy Point stops struggling and rasping for breath. When Chopper looks down, he sees this is because the man is dead.

“Oh my god,” comes Nami’s soft and shocked observation.

Chopper turns to Nami, concerned, because he’d seen her catch a glancing blow across the temple and head injuries plus the appallingly indiscriminate wave of haki can’t equal anything good. Nami’s pale and swaying, but dodges Chopper’s attempts to get a good look at her pupil dilation. Her eyes are fixed on the last place they’d seen Zoro, standing motionless next to the armoured cart.

Nami points, shakily, and repeats, “Oh my god.”

Usopp, who’s fairly used to throwing up in stressful situations and isn’t really surprised that his lunch made an impromptu exit, follows her portentous finger. The Admiral is dead. Even Usopp, untrained in the medical arts, can tell this, mostly because the man’s head lies several feet from his body. What has arrested Nami’s attention, however, is Zoro. Usopp adjusts his goggles, then scrubs at the lenses. It doesn’t help. Zoro is still, for some reason, _blurry_.

“ _Shit_ ,” Sanji curses, with feeling, as he steps up to join them. “He’s stuck in Asura.”

Sanji’s right. Zoro’s body does not seem to be overly committed to corporeality. Usopp sees three heads, now two, now three again. Limbs with phantom swords overlay around Zoro’s torso, doubling, then tripling, then snapping back to the regular amount. What expression Usopp can discern on Zoro’s face is equal parts dazed and crazed.

Sanji steps forward, intending to head towards Zoro, but hands spring from the ground to hold the cook’s ankles gently but firmly in place.

“I do not think that is a good idea, Sanji,” Robin says as she approaches the group, walking casually now that every enemy is either dead or unconscious from Zoro’s enormous release of destructive energy. Her restraining hands disappear in a puff of petals. “Zoro does not seem to be in control right now. He may not be able to tell friend from foe.”

Sanji has an uncomfortable flashback to Thriller Bark, and an even worse one to the day Luffy died.

They’re interrupted by the trilling of a den-den mushi from Nami’s cleavage. She fishes it out of her bra – Sanji goes briefly cross-eyed – and answers. “Hello?”

“Are you alright?” comes Elixir’s frantic voice. He rushes on, not stopping for an answer. “You need to get out of there right away! I managed to get most of the systems back online, but there’s an entire fleet on the radar, and I picked up a radio communication about more on the way! They’re going to surround us, you need to hurry! Hurry, hurry!”

“Okay, we’re on our way!” Nami replies. “Engage the cloaking mechanism-”

“What?”

“Press the giant blue button on the console! We’ve got Luffy’s,” – Nami really can’t bring herself to say ‘coffin’ – “we’ve got Luffy, but we’re going to need to hoist him up to the ship. Don’t attract any attention!” Nami hangs up. Usopp sees Franky and Brook making their way towards them and waves both his arms frantically. The skeleton and the cyborg break into a run.

“Alright,” Nami says as the crew gather around her. “Franky and Sanji, go work out how to get that cart thing moving and get it back to the ship. And bring Zoro with you. The rest of us will head back to Sunny and get it ready for take-off. Everyone good?”

As one, the crew look towards Zoro, who seems to have finally settled on the usual number of limbs. He’s looking about himself in confusion.

“I guess we’ll have to sort that one out later,” Sanji mutters. “Let’s get our captain and get out of here.”

 

* * *

 

Franky and Sanji approach Zoro cautiously. Their swordsman stands beside the armoured cart, both hands flat against the large cylinder it houses. Zoro’s face is pressed against the glass, and he’s muttering something.

“Zoro?” Franky asks tentatively. “Everything alright?”

Zoro jerks away from the cylinder and regards Franky and Sanji with a weird look in his eyes.

“He’s dead,” Zoro says ambiguously. Then, with a puzzled expression, “I _think_ it’s real.”

“Yeah, okay, we have to leave now,” Sanji says. He grabs Zoro by the arm and hustles him around to the back of the cart. Zoro doesn’t resist as Sanji pushes him up onto the bed of the cart, squishing him against one side of the cylinder. Franky folds himself with some awkwardness into the small cab in the front – he punches out the roof, which makes it easier – and after Franky makes few deft movements beneath the dashboard the cart’s engine starts rumbling.

“Everything alright back there, Sanji?” Franky calls out. When there’s no reply Franky sticks his head out of the hole in the roof and cranes his neck back. Zoro is sitting on the side of the cart, tapping on the glass of the cylinder with a finger. Sanji is standing next to the cart, staring.

“Yo, Sanji!” Franky calls again.

Sanji starts, and looks over to Franky. “Shit man,” he says, sounding a little shell-shocked, “that is _definitely_ Luffy.”

“We gotta go,” Franky says urgently. He kind of doesn’t want to think about it, not now. Sanji nods and hops into the cart, perching on the opposite side to Zoro. Franky presses down on the accelerator and the cart lurches forward.

It’s a bumpy ride back to the ship, what with all the rocks and corpses. They reach the Thousand Sunny and discover that Nami and the rest have already started warming up the ship’s engines and have managed to restore the atmospheric bubble around the ship.

With much waving of arms and shouting, a lever and pulley system is rigged to lift the cylinder out of the cart and onto the deck of the ship. The crew cluster around the now-upright cylinder in silence. The body of their beloved captain floats in semi-translucent fluid, encased in glass. Luffy’s eyes are open and staring, and his skin pallored.

“I’m so sorry,” Elixir whispers from somewhere in the back.

An alarm blares, once, from somewhere on board. Nami shakes herself.

“For now, we just have to get out of here,” she says. “Franky, control room. Robin and Brook, make sure everything’s strapped down. Chopper, take a look at Sanji’s arm, and anyone else who needs patching up. Usopp, we’re definitely going to need you on the targeting systems. Elixir and Zoro… just, stay out of trouble.”

 

* * *

 

Take-off is wobbly, but Sunny soon pulls herself together. She takes a hard left as soon as she exits Raftel’s atmosphere, which means she narrowly avoids four missiles launched from the looming _One Piece_ , the hulking research ship that would have been Luffy’s final resting place. Sunny dives back into the asteroid field, using the rocks and space debris as cover for the missiles that continue to chase them.

Several nearby explosions – entirely silent – send the ship careening one way, and then another. Sunny bounces off rocks as she skims off Raftel’s atmosphere, getting as much of the planet between her and _One Piece_ as possible. As she goes, Sunny releases clouds of electromagnetic chaff, hoping to confuse as many of their pursuers as possible.

Several blips are now showing up on the radar. Most of the larger transport ships are too slow to catch up with her, but several smaller battle spacers are gaining, and they’re agile enough to navigate around the asteroids. _Come on, Usopp_ , she prays, and sure enough several of her on-board cannons emerge mechanically from their hiding places and swivel around to face her pursuers.

A well-placed shot explodes a rock the size of Sunny in front of one of the battle spacers, knocking the ship sideways into one of his comrades, and taking them both out. Several more booms ring out from Sunny’s cannons, one taking out the wing of a ship, another the pilot himself. The marine’s body tumbles out of the shattered cockpit and collides, messily, with the engines of a third marine spacer that was swerving wildly to avoid another deadly cannon shot. This spaceship hits Raftel’s atmosphere at a weird angle and is slingshotted back into space at enormous velocity, before colliding rather permanently with a decommissioned satellite.

Within her, Sunny hears Usopp whoop in triumph, and she grins to herself. Then she feels the experimental cola-powered warp drive engage, and power thrums through every fibre of her being. The stars blur to pinpricks and Raftel shrinks to a tiny dot. Infinity stretches in every direction, and Sunny sees the end of time, and its beginning, and she can feel the immortality of the universe-

With an awful suddenness, space snaps into normality around her. Sunny comes to a dead stop in the middle of a vast field of nothingness.

 

* * *

 

Usopp finishes throwing up into the bucket they keep under the console for this very reason, and wipes his mouth.

“Pull yourself together,” Nami says dazedly, a little green about the edges herself.

“That’s the second time I’ve thrown up today,” Usopp complains. “I wish people would _warn_ me about this shit.”

“At least we’re safe.”

“For now,” Usopp adds darkly.

“For now,” Nami concedes.

They make their way out on to the deck of ship, where the rest of the crew have gathered. All of them look a little shaken, since most of them have only experienced Franky’s warp drive once or twice before. Zoro, who has _never_ experienced anything like moving through space just under the speed of light, and would quite like to never _again_ , is leaning against Luffy’s cylinder trying desperately to ground himself. Their space battle and rapid exit, following the mind-fuck that was his fight with the Admiral, have not left Zoro in a happy place.

“We’re in dead space,” Nami explains to everyone. “We should be okay for a bit. We got out of there pretty fast.”

“Urghn,” says Elixir.

“I’ll give you some anti-nausea patches later,” Chopper says, patting the boy commiseratingly on the back. “Is anyone else feeling weird?”

“No more than usual, doctor,” Robin says, in a weak attempt at humour. Nobody laughs.

This is mostly because Luffy’s cylinder still remains smack bang in the middle of Sunny’s main deck, lashed to main mast by Robin and Brook, and any way the Straw Hats look they see the remains of their long-gone captain.

“So,” Brook says softly. “Now what?”

Zoro moves suddenly, grabs Elixir by the back of his collar, and points the boy’s face towards Luffy’s.

“ _Now,”_ Zoro commands, in a terrifying tone of voice, “ _you_ _fix him_.”

Elixir gibbers for a few seconds, but Zoro’s grip is relentless.

“Hey, hey,” Franky interjects, stepping forward. “The boy can’t work miracles, Zoro.” The cyborg takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the pain he feels from the rest of the crew. “Luffy’s dead, and he’s not coming back.”

“ _Isn’t he?_ ” Zoro turns mad eyes from Franky to Elixir, who’s visibly shaking. “ _Because it seems to me_ ,” Zoro continues ruthlessly, “ _that if you can bring back the dead once, you can do it again_.”

“What are you talking about?” Usopp demands, eyes flicking between Zoro, Elixir, and Luffy. “Zoro, you were still alive when Elixir used his devil fruit. Like Brook said, it’s the only thing that makes sense, you healing over all this time in, I don’t know, suspended animation or something. But Luffy was, Luffy is…” Usopp trails off, as Zoro continues to ignore him.

“That was only a suggestion,” Brook says thoughtfully. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

“ _I was dead_ ,” Zoro says to nobody and everybody, his voice containing such naked truth it sends a chill down even Brook’s spine. He shakes Elixir by his collar. “ _I felt myself die_. _And you_ fucked _with that, and brought me back_ here _, so you’re also going to_ fix Luffy.”

Sanji shifts into a half battle-stance, torn between stopping Zoro because something is clearly not right, and listening to the tiny little bit of hope that suggests that the grief-mad swordsman might not be entirely in denial.

“Is that true, Elixir?” Sanji asks the boy, outright.

“Er, well, yes?” comes Elixir’s uncertain response. “I mean, it’s sort of possible? Because also I worked on Luffy before his execution, so, the thread should still be there and it did work for Zoro but over a _long time_ and I don’t know if he was entirely dead and now you’re telling me it shouldn’t have-” Elixir takes a deep breath, having run out of air. “So I guess, maybe?” he finishes.

 “Whaddya mean, _before_ his execution-” Nami begins, but Zoro cuts her off with a sharp wave of his hand.

“ _So fix him_ ,” Zoro commands again, shoving Elixir forward. The boy stumbles into Chopper, who pats his arm in a vaguely reassuring way.

“I’ll help,” the little doctor says determinately. “If there’s even a slight chance-” Chopper’s words stutter over themselves, the hope almost too painful to even think about. He shifts into doctor-mode, ignoring his own emotions to focus on the good of the patient. “We’ll work together. Come on,” Chopper says, dragging Elixir to the sick bay, the reindeer’s grip on his upper arm giving Elixir no choice in the matter.

Franky unfastens Luffy’s cylinder and trundles it after them. The rest of the crew stand around for a bit, helpless, until Nami gathers herself together and rallies everybody not actively engaged in resurrecting their captain to check navigation and defence systems, since whatever happens, they still have the entire marine cohort to worry about.

Nobody really looks at Zoro, who’s frozen in place. They skirt around him, as he stares at the closed sick bay door, seeing hell and blood.


	5. Chapter 5

Luffy’s consciousness comes screaming straight out of a hundred year old memory.

It had been such a great plan right up until he was kneeling on that platform, executioner blades poised above him. Then it was goddamn Loguetown all over again, his nakama yelling at the fringes. Too late, Luffy’s fault. At least, he hopes desperately, as the blades slice too easily into his body, his nakama get the fierce beauty of life for a long while yet.

Then the worst, most horrible sound Luffy’s ever heard rends the compound, and Luffy thinks, _oh god Zoro_.

There’s nothing Luffy can do, lying there dying. There’s screaming and death everywhere, but face down and hanging off the execution platform Luffy can’t tell if it’s his or everyone else’s. His first mate is pushed back by the onslaught into his field of vision. Zoro is covered in blood, performing death as art in a way that ordinarily Luffy would have admired. The aesthetic that is Zoro fighting is something Luffy’s never lost the taste for, the pure power and intensity matching the singing in Luffy’s own veins when they stand side-by-side in battle surge.

But Luffy can see that this is a death-song. A bullet finally brings his strong, noble swordsman down to earth, and for a century Zoro is kneeling below Luffy, head bowed, as Luffy’s slack hand drips his own lifeblood into Zoro’s green hair.

Crimson always looked so good with Zoro’s colouring, is Luffy’s last coherent thought before blackness descends.

 

* * *

 

An aeon later, Luffy realises he’s no longer breathing around steel, and can open his eyes. He does so.

The first thing he sees is the familiar ceiling of the sick bay.

He’s aware of a silence that seems to scream noise. There are people he knows in the room, knows very, very well. He blinks, and starts to sit up. He’s guided by a pair of gentle but firm hands – his doctor’s – who aid him but also prevent him from moving too fast. Once upright, he looks around the room.

His nakama are all there, staring at him, like they can’t believe their eyes. The only sound he can hear is that of his own breathing.

Then there is a choking noise beside him, and he turns, and sees the small form of the reindeer doctor gazing at him, tears in his eyes.

“Luffy! You’re-” Chopper breaks off, and hiccups, before drawing in a steadying breath. His next words are raw with relief: “You’re alive!”

At this the tension in the room snaps a little, and the oppressive silence lifts – now Luffy can hear the breathing of all his loved ones, the distant hum of some sort of machinery, the shuffling movements of cloth as Chopper stops holding himself back and hugs his captain. It’s surprisingly gentle.

Luffy coughs a little, and asks: “What happened?” Because the way his nakama are reacting, it’s scaring him a little.

“You don’t remember?” Robin inquires, gently.

Luffy frowns, and shakes his head. “I- no. It’s fuzzy.”

Usopp takes a deep breath. “Well-”

“You died.” Sanji interjects. His teeth are gritted around his cigarette and his tone is flat. “They executed you, and made us watch.”

Luffy’s eyes go wide in recognition. “I… remember that.”

“Except this guy-” Sanji jabs his thumb in the general direction of Elixir, who’s hanging around the edges “-has a devil fruit that can extend life. When we attacked, in the chaos, everyone there got accidentally blasted with it.”

Luffy stares at Elixir for a moment, who looks nervously hopeful. Then, dismissing him, the rubber man turns back to Sanji. “So I didn’t die.”

“Yes, you did.”

“But I’m here now. So I didn’t die.”

Sanji grits his teeth so hard his jaw creaks. “You died. You were dead. As a doornail. Passed away. Gone. Terminated.” Sanji takes a breath, wild-eyed. “Completely fucking-”

Nami lays a hand on his shoulder, stopping him cold. He seems to deflate slightly.

Usopp looks at him nervously but takes up the tale, softly at first but gaining momentum. “The marines took your body and preserved it for… a long time. Decades! Through the cunning and might of myself and other loyal members of your crew we have bravely managed to steal you back! The tale is a harrowing one; it began when-”

“Ah, Usopp. Maybe later, yes?” Brook interrupts softly.

Usopp stops, the mask of careless storyteller falling away. Something steels in his eyes, and when he looks back to Luffy he simply says: “Chopper fixed you up.”

Luffy absorbs this. He still doesn’t really know what’s going on, but he remembers the execution, and now he sees the aftermath of leaving his nakama. Apparently for _years_. He wants to reach out to them all, stretch around the room and protect them from the soul ravaged grief that came from losing a nakama; to save them from the sort of pain he’d felt when Ace died, that he’d glimpsed on Sabaody so many adventures ago. His nakama, all here, all gathered around his bed, looking to him for guidance. He sees Chopper still hiccupping quietly, five seconds away from full-on tears. Robin is trembling slightly; that Luffy can even see this is an indication of strong emotion. Franky looms at the back of the room, stern in a way that he never is unless something is absolutely serious. Usopp’s steely determination to be strong doesn’t falter, but Luffy has known him for a long time, and he can see that he’s shaky, and more than a little angry. Nami’s hand has white knuckles where it’s still on Sanji’s shoulder, and she looks soul-shocked. Sanji himself is barely contained in a desperate sort of calm. Brook is doing that emotionless skull thing he always does when things get too intense – empty sockets reflecting his time spent on a ship full of dead things. And Zoro…

For the first time, Luffy turns to look to his right, where his first crewmate is sitting, leaning forward onto the bed, staring at him almost unblinkingly. Luffy looks right at him, and asks: “Where’s Zoro?”

Nami gathers herself a little in confusion. “Luffy? He’s right there. You’re looking at him.”

Sanji’s tortured cigarette finally breaks in half, falling to the floor. “No he’s not. Zoro’s not been quite there since he was revived.”

“We’ve all noticed it,” Franky adds quietly.

Zoro doesn’t acknowledge that he’s the topic of conversation. He reaches out slowly and encircles Luffy’s nearest wrist with his larger hand, fingers on the pulse point. He continues to stare at Luffy, inhaling in tandem with Luffy’s own struggling lungs, and exhaling.

Luffy wants to fix this. _All_ of this. He has the feeling that only time and being together is going to heal the heart-scars of his nakama, who had thought they’d lost their captain. But there is something wrong with Zoro’s eyes, and Luffy knows that _this_ he can fix. He has to. He’s failed his crew completely once, and he cannot do so again.

Something clicks in Luffy’s head about what Sanji said. “Zoro was dead too?”

There is a collective shuddering from his nakama, which he interprets in the affirmative. Robin confirms this: “He died shortly after you did, Captain.”

Zoro just sits there, breathing with Luffy, staring intently at Luffy, silently counting Luffy’s heartbeats.

Luffy shakes his head slowly. “He didn’t have to do that.” _I thought you might. I’d hoped you wouldn’t._

Zoro exhales, and says, “Yes, he did.” _You gave me no other choice_.

Luffy looks at Zoro, at his nakama, helpless. He’s weak, and tired, and disoriented, and Luffy has no idea what’s wrong with Zoro but it’s _bad._

Seeing the distress of his patient, Chopper switches back to stern doctor. “Okay,” he says, clapping his hooves. “I need to do a full exam on Luffy. No buts!” he adds, as the crew starts to shift in protest. “It’ll only take an hour or two. Luffy needs some space.”

“But Chopper,” Luffy whines, unwilling to be separated from his nakama when he has very little idea of what’s going on.

“Luffy, you've been dead for a century,” Chopper says firmly. “So you’re going to have to let me make sure nothing _else_ is wrong with you.”

Luffy pouts, but subsides. Chopper gives the rest of the crew a meaningful look, and they shuffle out of the room reluctantly. Except for Sanji, who lingers in the doorway, and Zoro, who simply doesn’t move.

“Zoro, you too,” Chopper says.

Zoro lifts his head to look at the doctor and just for half a second, the smallest pirate feels the strongest urge to _run away, RIGHT NOW_.

“Zoro!” Luffy says sharply. “ _Stop it_.”

Zoro refocuses on Luffy’s face, blinks, and the look in his eyes fades to confusion. The swordsman unfolds himself from his chair carefully, like he doesn’t quite know how all his limbs work, and slowly walks from the room.

Sanji steps aside to let him pass, and is about to say something when Luffy forestalls him.

“Where’s my hat?”

“Where’s _your_ _hat_?” Sanji asks furiously, and then abruptly storms out the room. He returns half a minute later, and tosses the legendary straw hat into Luffy’s lap with a complete lack of ceremony. “Here’s your hat. It was the only thing we could get off that shithole of a battlefield. Not you, not Zoro, but we got your fucking hat!”

“Sanji-”

“No,” Sanji says, pointing an angry finger at Luffy, “you do _not_ get to get out of this scot free. This is your fault, and Zoro’s fault, and one of you is going to have to take fucking responsibility and you’re the fucking captain. So you will sit there while Chopper makes sure you’re not going to _die_ again, and then you’re going to tell us exactly what fucking happened back then, godammit!”

 

* * *

 

Sanji stomps out of the sick room, making as much noise as he possibly can. Good god he’s pissed – mostly because anger’s easier than anything else right now – and he wants _so badly_ to fuck something up. Pity there are no marines around.

Sanji huffs his way across to where Zoro is slumped against the mast, two of his swords on the ground next to him, and one gripped in his fist – the red one. Sanji’s foot slams into the mast just beside Zoro’s head, but the swordsman doesn’t flinch.

Sanji sweeps his leg over Zoro’s head, the wind of its passage ruffling the man’s hair, but there is still no reaction.

Sanji leans in kiss-close, and snarls in Zoro’s face, but the other man’s eyes are fixed on a point somewhere to the right of Sanji.

_What the fuck._

Luffy is recovering from mortality, and Sanji’s other dead-not-dead crewman is cracked and breaking in front of him, and Sanji is so, _so_ pissed.

 

* * *

 

Zoro, for his part, is trying really hard to make sense of _anything_ right now. Luffy is alive. He should be happy. His nakama are reunited, and Luffy is _alive_.

He is. Zoro saw. Proof of heartbeat, proof of breath: proof of life.

Yet his heart still feels shattered and missing. It’s hard, when his nakama look at him like he’s two parts stranger one part demon. When Luffy’s stare burns holes through him and leaves scorch marks on the back of his head. When neither one of them should be here, when Zoro particularly has a century of penance to undertake, one hundred years of apology for Not Being There.

Asura still crowds the edges of his vision. It’s hard, because maybe Luffy is electrons and not flesh, maybe his nakama are false, simulacra, and Zoro is lost in virtuality. One half of him rejoices in the clear salty breeze of a wide open ocean, and the other tells him it’s nothing but still and stale air. The Admiral really fucked him up, but Zoro’s not even sure if he wants to come back from it, to a reality where all he loves has been stripped from him and Zoro wakes up lying in a pool of broken glass and glowing fluid.

Zoro tries to marshal his thoughts, but they slip away like eels in dark water. It’s hard, because Wadō is still not speaking to him, Shūsui is inert. Kitetsu chants for blood – but whose? There is nobody left. His nakama took care of the guilty, the admiral that had Luffy has no heads left. Zoro is bereft of solid vengeance, digging that second grave, but his captain still breathes again in front of him.

Zoro shouldn’t be alive. Luffy shouldn’t be alive.

Zoro _really_ shouldn’t be alive.

 

* * *

 

“Do you think Zoro is going to be alright?” Nami asks Sanji, leaning across the kitchen counter. Sanji had given up trying to get a response from the swordsman and started on the enormous meal Luffy would inevitably demand when Chopper let him loose.

“No,” Sanji says bluntly, vindictively chopping carrots. He tips them off the chopping board into a pot already half full of ingredients, lights the flame underneath it, and stirs the mixture aggressively.

“Luffy will fix him,” Nami says with quiet firmness, but when Sanji looks up, he sees the uncertainty in her eyes.

 

* * *

 

Sanji slams the galley door open, spilling light onto a starlit deck. Zoro has not, to all intents and purposes, moved at any time in the last two hours.

“Dinner’s ready,” Sanji says, because it’s dark so let’s call it dinner.

Zoro doesn’t acknowledge him.

Sanji strides over to him. “Oi, asshole, dinner’s ready. Come fucking eat.” Sanji slams his foot on the mast near Zoro’s clenched fist for good measure, jogging the red sword.

Zoro shifts to grip Kitetsu’s scabbard more firmly, and _finally_ looks up at Sanji. The cook is expecting Zoro to say, “Not hungry”, or something equally stupid.

_Please fucking refuse. Please give me a reason to start a fight, like we used to._

_Godammit, please come back to us you marimo-headed idiot-faced asshole._

Instead, Zoro just levers himself off the mast and walks stiffly past Sanji and into the galley. He sits down with the rest of his nakama at the table and begins mechanically spooning food into his mouth.

Sanji, emitting clouds of annoyance, stalks in behind him and slams the door shut.

Nobody notices, because Luffy starts all meals as soon as he sits down – none of this waiting for everybody nonsense – and the rest of the crew are too busy re-learning how to protect their own portions amid the chaos.

It’s amazing how quickly they all fit back in together. It’s been literal decades, but Luffy is sliding back into their lives like he’d never left it. And, Sanji supposes, a big part of that might be because none of the crew had ever _let_ Luffy leave them, kept him in their hearts and their minds, an empty space at the table at every anniversary.

_Not healthy_ , Sanji thinks, not for the first time, as he portions out seconds and makes sure Luffy doesn’t inhale the _entire_ table. They should probably rename the Sunny ‘Co-dependency’.

Hours of battle and the resulting adrenaline crash seems to have awakened the hunger beast in everyone; even Robin has thirds. As a result, it’s some time before things calm down enough for conversation.

Chopper is giggling over Luffy and Usopp having a fork battle for the last meatball when suddenly the incongruity of the whole situation hits him. Luffy’s _alive_ , after a century of mourning him, and fighting over food in Sunny’s kitchen like nothing ever happened. Chopper’s throat closes up suddenly, chocking off laughter that was becoming hysteric. Now more sober, Chopper looks around the table.

Others seem to feel it too: Robin is thoughtfully cradling a teacup, staring off into the distance. Nami is frowning and having a silent conversation with a tense Sanji, and Zoro – well, Zoro certainly hadn’t shared the giddiness that had seized the crew the moment Luffy had come bounding into the kitchen, _alive_ and demanding meat.

Usopp, triumphant, stuffs the meatball in his mouth whole. His food-full grin falters when he realises the mood around the table has shifted. He swallows his mouthful with difficulty.

“What’s wrong?” he asks somewhat indistinctly.

“What really happened that day, Luffy?” Nami asks softly.

Luffy is reaching for the empty meatball plate with a view to licking it clean, but withdraws his hand to his lap at Nami’s question. All attention turns to the captain as he blows out a large breath through his nose thoughtfully.

“I messed up,” Luffy says.

Sanji kicks him in the back of the head.

Which causes Luffy to faceplant into a badly placed bowl of mashed potatoes, and then rebound shrieking, “Hot, hot, hot, hot!”

Nami grabs Elixir by his collar as the boy, whose conflict-avoidance sense is almost as finely tuned as Usopp’s, tries to sneak out the door. She forces him to sit back down.

Sanji does much the same thing with Luffy, who had mostly solved his problem by eating it. Franky offers the captain a napkin from across the table, which Luffy uses to fish potato out his ears.

“Let’s start with something simpler,” Brook says hastily, attempting to diffuse the growing tensions in the room. “How did you get caught by the marines in the first place?”

Luffy rearranges his face into what he hopes is a suitably serious expression, to ward off Nami’s glowering. “Seastone,” he says gruffly.

Sanji rolls his eyes. “And what were you doing out there by yourself in the first place, dumbass? You just disappeared off the ship!”

“I left a note,” Luffy protests.

“‘Back soon’,” Usopp quotes, gloomily. “I mean, that really explained a lot. We totally knew what was going on when we read that.”

Robin lowers her teacup to its saucer with a soft chink. Sensing that questioning Luffy isn’t going to get them very far, she turns her attention to Elixir.

“Elixir, earlier you said something about ‘before Luffy’s execution’ – what did you mean by that?” she asks.

Elixir squirms in his seat. “Well, I don’t- what I meant was-”

Unexpectedly, it’s Luffy who comes to his rescue.

“I had a Plan,” Luffy says. “Elixir was gonna help me with it, ‘cause I helped him.”

Elixir nods, grateful he’s not withstanding the scrutiny of the crew alone. “Luffy saved my village… and me.”

“Never mind about that,” Usopp says, waving his hand dismissively. “So somehow, Luffy, you knew about Elixir’s powers-”

“Who told you about Elixir?” Nami interrupts.

“Dunno,” Luffy says helpfully. “Ivankov probably.”

(“Is Ivankov still around?” Brook asks Sanji _sotto voce_.

“They’d better fucking be so I can smash their stupid okama head in,” Sanji replies, hating the world and everything in it.)

“Alright, and then what?” Usopp demands. “So you knew about Elixir, and? I’m guessing the government knew about him too, huh?”

“Yup,” says Luffy. “That’s how we got caught.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” Sanji says through gritted teeth.

“I couldn’t get Luffy out,” Elixir says tearfully, earnestly, “so I thought if I could just get at you with my powers we could sort something out, but then Luffy was-, and, and Mr. Roronoa-, and I didn’t really understand what I was doing-” Elixir breaks off.

“Why did it take so long for you to contact us, Elixir, if you knew they had kept Luffy and Zoro?” Brook asks.

“Well, by then it had been one hundred years, so I thought it would be more… meaningful, you know,” Elixir says in a small voice.

“Do you mean to say,” Sanji says lowly, “that the reason we didn’t get our nakama back earlier was because of your sense of _dramatic timing_?!” Sanji looks like he’s about to lunge across the table and strangle Elixir with his bare hands.

“No!” Elixir yelps. “I mean, not entirely.” Seeing the expression on Sanji’s face, Elixir rushes to explain. “I only found out where Zoro was a few months ago, when they moved him for the exhibition. And then it took me _ages_ to get access to the systems, and, and…”

“It’s alright,” Brook says, laying a bony but calming hand on Elixir’s shoulder. “We’re grateful for everything you’ve done for us.”

“But _why_ did you need Elixir’s help?” Chopper asks Luffy tremulously. “Why didn’t you tell _us_?”

“It was supposed to be easier to get at Elixir by myself. More sneaky. Also-”, Luffy’s gaze drops to the table. “I wanted it to be a surprise,” he says, guilty.

“Wanted _what_ to be surprise?” Franky exclaims.

Luffy looks up, wide-eyed. “Haven’t you guys realised? Immortality!” Luffy throws his arms in the air, the gesture encompassing the room and everyone in it.

“This- you did this _on purpose_?” Nami asks in horror.

“Well, not the execution part,” Luffy says, and the way he turns his head makes it obvious he’s deliberately not looking at Zoro. “But it worked out. I knew you guys would find me. Elixir did a great job!” Luffy grins at the boy.

Elixir cringes a little and tries to shrink back in his chair.

“You have an interesting definition of ‘worked out’, Captain,” Robin says. “Not only have we spent the better part of a century mourning you – and our swordsman – but Elixir has spent the entirety of that time a prisoner of the people you were trying to save him from and, as a result, many citizens have suffered unduly from an oppression which may have been avoided by the natural progression of history.”

Luffy becomes still, as he absorbs Robin’s words. His expression is battlefield serious.

“When I was little,” Luffy says after a moment, “I heard stories of Gol D. Roger. He was strong, and powerful, and rich, and I wanted to be like him. When I heard the story of his final words, how One Piece was still out there, I knew that the only thing I wanted out of life was to gather nakama and become the Pirate King. And I did, and it was awesome. But along the way I also figured out that I didn’t want what Roger had left behind. Leaving his crew like that. I didn’t want to end up as some kid’s fairytale, or a sad old man in a marine prison. I didn’t want to leave my nakama behind, and I didn’t want them leaving me behind.”

Luffy takes a deep breath. “I wanted to become Pirate King,” he says. “But I didn’t want to become Pirate King without every one of you standing by my side. After Ace... Knowing I had you guys to come back to was the only thing that got me through it. I’m not strong enough, and I’m sorry, but I’m _not strong enough_ to go through that again." And now the steel and determination that made Luffy the Pirate King shines through his eyes. "I make my _own_ destiny, and I am _not_ losing _anyone_ , not anymore.”

The feeling in the room is as fragile as glass. Chopper and Franky are both openly crying, and everyone else’s eyes are suspiciously bright.

“I’m so, _so_ sorry for what happened,” Luffy says. His voice is raw with sincerity. “I can only promise to try and make it up to you over time, and maybe together we can get history back on track.”

A flicker of a smile passes across Robin’s face.

“But I am _not_ sorry for making sure we’re all going to be here for a long time, that I'm never again going to lose _anyone_ ,” Luffy continues, fiercely. Then he shrugs. “That’s it.”

There’s a few moments of silence.

Usopp opens his mouth to say something, but is interrupted by Zoro’s chair scraping back. The swordsman gets up and leaves, without looking at anyone, his face stony. The closest to the door, Nami reaches out to stop him, but he brushes past her and out onto the deck.

The door swings closed behind him.

“Luffy, he’s-, you need to talk to him,” Nami says.

“Leave it,” Luffy snaps, Captain-voice.

Nami does a double-take at the unexpected reprimand. Luffy sighs and rubs his nose, suddenly looking very tired and so _young_.

“We all need sleep,” Chopper says. There’s a general murmur of agreement. The crash-landing and battle, the resurrection of their captain and the emotionally draining dinner conversation, have left them all exhausted.

One by one the crew slowly break into groups and shuffle off to their quarters. Nami gravitates towards Luffy and hugs him, brief but tight, whispering goodnight. Robin likewise hugs Luffy, kisses him on the cheek, eliciting a small smile, and follows Nami out, propelling Elixir before her. Franky shepherds Luffy in the direction of the men’s quarters, the rubber-man actually stumbling with tiredness, worn-out. Sanji begins mechanically clearing the table, and Brook starts on the dishes, waving away a half-hearted objection from their cook.

Chopper and Usopp help finish clearing the table, and then they too stumble onto the dark deck of Sunny. Something makes Chopper look up at the crow’s nest, and he elbows Usopp in the kneecaps to get his attention. Usopp makes an inquisitive noise, and then his gaze follows where Chopper is pointing. A figure, which Usopp can only assume is Zoro, leans against the windows of the crow’s nest, barely visible in the darkness of space around them.

“Is that… okay?” Chopper asks Usopp worriedly.

“Probably not. But do you want to be the person to go up there and tell him that Franky’s radar makes a watch unnecessary?”

“I’m his _doctor_. Zoro really needs the sleep.”

“Who cares,” Usopp mutters, turning away.

“Usopp!” Chopper chides, shocked.

“That’s not Zoro!” Usopp bursts out. “Okay? I don’t know what came back to us, but it’s not Zoro!”

“It’s been a long time,” Chopper says, softly. “We might-”

“I _know_ my nakama,” Usopp interjects angrily. “That’s not- He’s not-” Usopp struggles with his words, and then sags abruptly, the fight going out of him. “I’m so worried, and so tired, Chopper. Luffy seems okay for now but what if…”

Chopper shuffles closer to Usopp, and hugs his knees. “It’s the grief doing this to Zoro. Luffy hasn’t lost any of us. Zoro thought he’d lost _all_ of us. It’ll just… take time, for him to re-adjust.”

Usopp crouches down to complete the hug. “I really, really hope so.”

They stay like that for a time, drawing comfort from each other.

 

* * *

 

By the time Chopper and Usopp reach the men’s quarters, everyone else is already there, including the women. Nami has claimed the couch, and Robin is curled up in an armchair with a book on her lap. Luffy lies on the bunk most central to the room, already deep asleep.

_Dead to the world_ , is the metaphor Usopp’s asshole of a mind uses, and he’s unable to stop himself from going over to Luffy, just to check. Luffy still breathes, in and out, slow and steady. When Usopp looks up, he sees Robin smiling at him knowingly. That actually makes him feel a lot better, because with Robin keeping watch most of the night Usopp can sleep a little easier.

The crew quietly get ready for bed, putting on pyjamas if they’re so inclined, adjusting pillows and blankets. Sanji finds an extra blanket for Nami – Sunny’s climate control systems are still a little wonky – and is rewarded with a tired but grateful smile. One by one, the crew settle into their respective beds. Though they don’t realise it, each and every one of them is turned so that their bodies face the sleeping form of Luffy.

It takes a while for anybody else to drop off. The room is quiet. Franky’s low, rumbling breathing sounds like the Sunny at rest, and it forms a comforting background noise.

Slowly, the weird feeling in the room eases. A sort of serenity emerges from the steady inhale-exhale of the tight-knit crew, with Luffy in the centre of it all. Calm in the eye of the storm.

They sleep.

 

* * *

 

Sleep works its usual magic, dissolving the tense atmosphere of the night before. Several hours later the crew wake up remembering that _Luffy is back_. The sight of his sprawled form _right there_ pushes resentment aside, for the moment, and replaces it with joy. A sort of disbelieving exhilaration drives the crew as they go about their morning chores, _and_ the marines don’t seem to have found them yet, which is just the icing on the cake.

Sanji is actually humming as he prepares breakfast, when the quiet of the morning is shattered by Luffy yelling. It doesn’t sound like ‘I’m dying’ yelling, but Sanji sticks his head out of the door of the galley just in case. Luffy is hopping from foot to foot, almost bursting with excitement, while Usopp stares at their captain incredulously.

“Sanji! Usopp says we’re in space?!” Luffy interrobangs, catching sight of the cook.

“You didn’t notice?!”

“I thought it was just night time! This is _so. cool!_ ”

Luffy stretches out an arm, grabs the underside of the crow’s nest, and then slingshots himself into the air and then around to the very tip top of the mast.

“Luffy, be careful!” Nami shrieks, drawn out to the deck by the noise. Luffy’s only answer is joyful laughter.

Arms unfold themselves from Nami’s back and wrap around her torso, hugging her gently. Robin looks up from where she’s sitting reading on a deck chair nearby, and smiles at her. Nami grips Robin’s wrists for comfort.

“He’s only been alive for like a day and I’m already going to have a heart-attack,” Nami says, slightly hysterically.

“It is a shock,” Robin agrees, and tightens the hug a little. “But he is _alive_ ,” she breathes, looking up to where Luffy is surveying the ship and the space around them in wonderment.

“Yeah,” Nami says, tears in her voice, “yeah, he is.”

 

* * *

 

Breakfast is chaotic, and even though there are chores to do on the ship no-one seems to want to be away from Luffy for more than a few minutes. The crew takes turns in hovering around him, showing or telling him the things that have changed, and Luffy basks in their attention, delighted to be surrounded by nakama and endlessly curious about this new world.

Except Zoro, who is conspicuously absent. Franky finds him still in the crow’s nest, staring at the wall. Franky tries and fails to pretend Zoro’s just meditating, so he drags the swordsman out and makes him bring lumber up from the hold onto the deck where Franky is making a start on fixing some of the damage caused by the crash-landing.

Around lunch-time, the euphoria from having Luffy back among them has faded to more manageable levels, and everyone has noticed Zoro’s reaction – or more accurately, lack of reaction. The crew gathers in the galley, Sanji having prepared a light meal of sandwiches. Franky is the last to arrive, hurrying in and closing the door behind him in a conspiratorial manner.

“Where’s Zoro?” Luffy asks through a mouthful of ham and bread.

“I don’t think he slept,” Franky says, brow creasing in concern. He’d left Zoro zoning out, staring at either a hole in the ship’s railing or into the space beyond.

“Does anyone have any idea what’s _wrong_ with Zoro?” Usopp asks. “I mean, you know, apart from going through the grief of losing everyone you love by yourself for a week until finding out actually you didn’t.”

“Oh, apart from that?” Nami says sarcastically.

“He has been through a lot of trauma recently,” Brook says.

Robin hums in agreement and adds: “We must also remember that for Zoro, ‘recently’ includes the day of Luffy’s execution.”

“I’m not really an expert on this,” Chopper says, “but could the strain of coming back to life have affected him mentally, somehow?”

The crew turns to Elixir, who shakes his head. “My powers only have physical effect; anyway Luffy is fine. And I keep _telling_ you guys, I can’t bring people back to life.”

“Yeah?” Sanji says nastily. “Then riddle me this, O God of the Dead: if you can’t resurrect people why the hell do we have two dead nakama standing in front of us?”

“I don’t know! It shouldn’t work like that! I can preserve the flesh, and prevent degeneration, and over a very long time that can sort of be like healing. But I can’t bring back the dead.”

“You did it with me,” Luffy says.

“I didn’t!” Elixir shakes his head vigorously, curls bouncing. “A body is just a body! I can only work on the cellular level; I can keep a _body_ from decaying, but you need the _soul_ to be really alive.”

“So, you’re saying that neither Luffy nor Zoro’s souls _left_? They just hung around? Brook, does that make _any_ sense?” Nami asks.

“I’m not sure,” Brook muses. “My soul was able to return to the mortal realm because of the devil fruit I ate. There are other devil fruits that can affect the soul, but it does not seem that Elixir’s is one of them.”

“Don’t be stupid, Brook,” Luffy says. “I stayed because I wanted to. My nakama were here. Like I said, I’m not going anywhere.”

“And Zoro?”

“If I’m here, Zoro’s here.”

There’s a thoughtful silence for a few moments. ~~~~

“He’s not really _here,_ though, is he?” Sanji says bitterly.

Luffy hops off his stool with a look of determination on his features. Everyone recognises that expression – they’ve all seen it many times before.

“So we get him back,” Luffy says simply, and marches out of the galley.

“Oh dear,” Robin says, echoing the thoughts of everyone in the room, as they all follow Luffy out onto the deck.

 

* * *

 

“What he going to do?” Usopp whisper-asks Nami as they all watch Luffy stride across the deck towards Zoro.

“How does Luffy usually fix things?” she replies, mouth turning down.

“Oh, no.”

“Zoro.” Luffy says his first mate’s name like it’s his own.

Zoro snaps out of whatever world he’s in and locks eyes with Luffy.

“Come back,” Luffy commands.

“You were wrong,” Zoro says. “We didn’t find you. You died.”

“No,” says Luffy, “I’m not dead.”

But Zoro’s shaking his head slowly from side to side, as if to clear it of something, and then his eyes screw up and a spasm of rage and pain crosses his face.

“The dead should stay dead!” Zoro roars, hands clenched in fists.

“Should they?” Brook asks quietly from the sidelines.

Zoro turns to their resident, original, resurrected man, meeting his eyes in challenge.

“When I choose death, I expect to stay dead,” Zoro spits out. “Tell me you didn’t want to die with your crew!”

“Zoro!” Nami tries to interrupt, horrified.

“I did,” Brook says calmly. “I had Laboon to live for, but it almost wasn’t enough. But now,” Brook’s tone changes to steel, “now I count myself blessed thrice times over. I have been given a third life, one that will not be filled with times of grief but with endless days of laughter with the people I love.”

“Zoro, you have too,” Brook reaches out to Zoro. “Another life! And Luffy! With us all. See us in front of you, _we are still here_ ,” Brook pleads.

Zoro shakes his head. Brook is wrong. If the dead don’t stay dead then the ground disappears from beneath your feet and nothing is real but feels real and you end up in a chaotic world where Luffy doesn’t breathe anymore. And if Luffy doesn’t breathe then neither does Zoro, _quod erat demonstrandum_ , as Robin would say-

-and now this awful lie not-lie with Luffy standing in front of him asking for something, but Zoro doesn’t know what, he would give his captain everything, anything, but he doesn’t know what and if everything is still _wrong_ then the only way to make it _right_ it by getting Luffy back, which he did, except it’s all a lie, and now his nakama look at him like _he’s_ wrong, so maybe he is-

-and anyway it’s Zoro’s fault, because Luffy trusted them to come for him but they didn’t, they failed him, Zoro _failed_ , couldn’t even keep the crew from falling apart, couldn’t keep himself alive, doesn’t deserve to be here, this fleeting reprieve before his sanity is snatched away again, watching his loved ones die over and over-

With locked lungs and Asura still blurring the edges of his vision, Zoro turns to face Luffy. And when he sees Zoro’s face, the confusion and uncertainty in Luffy’s eyes clears.

Luffy flexes his hand, makes a fist, draws back his arm, and throws the first punch.

Zoro’s in battle mode, been there since he woke, dodges Luffy’s punch and swiftly draws his two swords – but not Wadō, who’s yelling at him for some reason but he still can’t hear her.

(Chopper yells out “Stop”, his voice high, and loud, and raw, but Sanji crouches down to grab their doctor, and holds him, and whispers, “They need to do this.”)

Luffy’s second punch connects solidly with Zoro’s crossed swords and for a moment they are held in balance-

“You’re not Luffy,” Zoro hisses.

“Then you’re not Zoro,” Luffy says.

-and Luffy’s fist slides away and Zoro’s swords part, and the two opponents round on each other again. Luffy: determined. Zoro: desperate.

They come together several more times, reasonably evenly matched. A glancing blow will leave a bruise blossoming on Zoro’s cheekbone, and two or three nicks bead blood on Luffy’s hands and arms. Wood splinters from the force of a recklessly stretched punch, a railing splits in half from the sharp air that follows a swinging sword.

Luffy’s face becomes more serious and his punches more unforgiving, fist encased in black as deep as the space surrounding them. Zoro’s swords become more precise and deadly as his eyes become more desperate, fighting himself and the world at the same time.

Tension thrums among the crew as their captain and first mate clash, no quarter given. A crescendo is building, threading through the ship, and the raw power on show makes the air heavy.

Luffy punches once, twice. The force and angle of the first punch knocks Zoro’s arm up, Shūsui held uselessly in the air. Zoro brings Kitetsu to bear just in time to block the second punch.

A shockwave booms out from the point of contact, and a sound like shifting ice follows the cracks spreading out across the sword’s surface under Luffy’s fist. Kitetsu _shatters_ , right through. Shards of steel ping as they fly through the air, stinging needles.

Zoro drops the now useless hilt. Luffy breathes hard, willing Zoro to look him in the eyes. Zoro lifts his head, but deadness just stares back.

The wave of guilt that hits Luffy is so strong it feels like it’s going to throw him overboard. Some healing needs time, but _this_ , what’s wrong with Zoro, Luffy needs to fix _now_. Luffy doesn’t know if he can punch out soul-crushing grief, but he’s damn sure going to try.

Zoro lifts Wadō’s scabbard from his belt, but instead of drawing the sword he tosses it to the side. Luffy’s eyes follow it as it clatters on deck, knowing by this gesture that his first mate is still somewhere missing. Zoro raises Shūsui, two-handed, and gives Luffy a look that tells him that, while _Zoro_ may be gone, the World’s Greatest is still very much alive.

Haki ribbons through the air as Zoro and Luffy come together for round two. Down two swords and Zoro’s control keeps fucking up, Luffy has the edge in this fight; and Luffy has far more to lose.

Luffy is dodging one of Zoro’s more deadly attacks when the rubber-man crashes into the main mast, tearing apart the already weakened wood. The mast sways alarmingly, and then begins to fall like a giant felled tree. The crew scatter away from the galley door as the main mast tilts, and crashes into the second mast.

A large plume of dust and wood splinters obscures the deck as the Sunny rocks from the impact. In the middle of it all, temporarily blinded, Luffy’s flailing hand comes into contact with a scabbard.

Zoro isn’t deterred by the chaos; he charges into the dust-

-only to find his bare neck exposed to the naked edge of Wadō. Zoro freezes, absolutely.

So does everything else.

There’s a hysterical sound. Zoro staggers forward, nicking his neck on the blade, and it would have gone deeper, slicing his throat, had not Luffy jerked the sword back in horror. Zoro falls to his knees, his head falls into his chest, and there he stays. Prostrate, obsequient, in front of his King.

Zoro’s chest heaves. His tears dampen the deck, but there is no sound.

Luffy sinks to his knees in front of Zoro. Lowers his head, so their foreheads are touching. Then he reaches his hand out, and encircles Zoro’s slack wrist, fingers on the pulse point. Zoro mimics his movement, gripping Luffy’s own wrist, and there they kneel, counting each other’s heartbeats, in and out, in synchronicity.

Two dead men, breathing for each other.


	6. Epilogue

_The sobs wracking Zoro’s body slow and eventually stop. Luffy grips Zoro’s forearms and lifts himself and Zoro up from the ground. They hug, holding onto each other tightly. Muffled by Luffy’s shoulder, Zoro whispers “I’m sorry”, sorry for dying, sorry for losing himself and losing control, sorry for failing the crew and Luffy, sorry. Luffy’s fists bunch in Zoro’s shirt, and he shakes his head, no, it’s fine, you’re fine, we’re all here._

_Chopper squirms out of Sanji’s slack hold, and rushes towards their embracing crewmates. He rams into Zoro’s knees, shifts to heavy point, and then bear-hugs both Zoro and Luffy. The rest of the crew isn’t far behind. Brook’s relief is palpable, snaking bony hands around the back of Zoro and Luffy’s necks. Sanji’s fingers dig almost painfully into Zoro’s back as the cook joins the huddle. Nami’s there in the middle, hugging one, then the other, eyes shining. Usopp wiggles under Chopper’s arm, pokes Luffy sharply in the side, and then makes Luffy’s shirt damp with his tears. Robin rests her head against Zoro’s and links her arm under Luffy’s. Franky encircles them all, protective, his crying the loudest of all._

_For the first time in one hundred years, the Straw Hat crew is complete._

 

* * *

 

One week later, Sanji laughs so hard his chest hurts. Nami frowns less, Robin smiles more, Usopp’s nightmares begin to fade. Brook feels more at home than he has in years, Franky can’t stop happy-crying, and Chopper sleeps soundly again. Zoro burns with life, ignited anew whenever Luffy catches his eye. It’s going to take a while still, and sometimes somebody snaps and says something hurtful, or wakes screaming, or cries at dinner. But they’re getting there, and as the days pass, forgiveness becomes easier - for everyone.

One week later, their bounties have been re-activated and the reward doubled. They’ve been ambushed twice, and destroyed four large marine carriers. Usopp’s broken one bone and complained twenty-four times. The Straw Hats are publicly condemned for stealing the elixir of life, brutally murdering an admiral, and resurrecting the Pirate King. To Elixir’s never-ending delight, Luffy declares the boy an honorary Straw Hat. Luffy’s legend grows to epic proportions.

One week later, on every marine base across the entire solar system, the public broadcasting system crackles to life.

“My name is Monkey D. Luffy and I’m the man who became Pirate King! I’m taking back my crown, and anyone who stands in my way is going to get their asses kicked! You want One Piece? Come and get it!”

A declaration of war. Zoro stands behind Luffy as he sends his message out into the world. Their captain, _his_ captain, sharp-edged, sharp-eyed, and so very dangerous.

Smiling fierce, and proud, and _alive_.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End.
> 
> Eight years later, this story is out of my system and I can finally stop carrying it around. This story took all my stamina and it's still not as long as it deserves to be, but! That's all I've got. And I hope it's good enough.
> 
> Thank you very much to everybody who has left/leaves kudos and comments, you make me unimaginably happy.


End file.
